Garden Bloggers Bloom Day

It appears that I took the previous month off - it wasn't intentional, but it happened.  I will remedy that right now.  Welcome to another edition of Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, where garden bloggers post photos of what's blooming in their yard.

With so many plants growing close to the ground, one doesn't always look up.  It pays to do so when your tallest yucca decides to bloom.  It's tall enough that it makes it hard to get a decent picture.

When we think of American beautyberry, we don't usually think of flowers, but that's what you need if you want berries.  Here they are.















I'm not exactly sure how this is a flower, but this is what the root beer plant does during the summer.  I've never seen any seeds - it actually spreads fairly easily by way of underground stolons, or horizontal roots.

I can always count on my American Bog Lilies to put on a show.  They're in a sometimes shady, overgrown bog area, and when these white flowers appear, they really pop.

The last couple of years I've enjoyed seeing my night-blooming cactus do its thing.  It's in a little less than ideal spot - a little too much sun, but it puts on a show a few times a year now.




I'm not really sure how many different types of day lilies I have, but here's another one.

I thought I had posted a photo of my backyard sunflowers, but it doesn't look like it.  Here's a shot of it, almost fully open, with bees pollinating it.

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day

I started doing a "Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day" post every month last spring, but after the summer and fall, I ran out of blooms to post photos of.  This may happen again this year, but, even if it is only vegetables, I hope to be able to post pics for the whole year - actually I just thought about this, and a lot of winter

vegetables are leafy greens, so maybe I won't be able to.  I'll cross that bridge when I come to it - here are the past months blooms.

I've had trouble with this lantana for the last few years.  It might need more water or more shade.  It's in what I used to refer to as the "desert garden", which gets full sun and drains pretty quickly.  It's doing better this spring, probably due to the fact that we have had so much rain.

You don't always think about certain plants blooming, especially when there are more interesting aspects.  Some carnivorous plant enthusiasts recommend cutting off the stem before it flowers, so it doesn't take energy away from producing more and larger traps, but I don't agree.  These are beautiful, right?

Every year these old garden roses bloom very close
to Mother's Day, early May.  We had a cold spring that just would not warm up.  It finally did and everything started blooming - late - including these roses.

I think I like the blooms of plants that you don't expect to bloom.  Some are just unusual, like these elephant ears.  They got huge last year, and they have recovered well after a mild winter.  I would like to transplant them to a more visible area - right now they are behind the chicken coop - but they are growing through some giant roots, and any attempt to  dig them up would mean their destruction.

This is one of my least favorite plants.  There are probably better varieties of Nandina that have a nicer form, or are sterile, but this one is a pain.  Amongst the switch cane that I was trying to kill by smothering it, was a number of these volunteer plants.  Birds eat the seeds and then sit in a tree and drop them, from one end or the other, and they sprout.  With the help of carpet and chickens I was able to eradicate the bamboo/switch cane, but the nandina would not die, and the chickens won't eat it.

First daylily of the year.  I got this at a plant swap last year, so I didn't know what it would look like until it bloomed.  Apparently its name is "Grape Magic".  I had all my daylilies labeled until recently when I transplanted them to another bed.  So I'm excited to see which is which when they bloom this year.

I love it when I catch a pollen-covered bee in one of my flowers.  They always look like they're in heaven.  In this case, it's one of my many squash flowers.  They're blooming like crazy right now.

This is some Rudbeckia, I think, that I grew from seed last year.  I had a number of these plants, as well as Echinacea, and I didn't know which was which until they all started blooming this year.  I also kept getting bees in the pictures of a lot of the flowers, as you can see.  No problem with pollinators in my yard!

The irises around the pond bloomed a couple of months ago, but this pickerel weed is just starting to bloom.  It has multiple tiny flowers on this plant, and it will bloom continuously for the whole summer.  I want to make a few changes to the back yard, which would mean this pond would go, but I would still have room for marginals, like this plant.

This is one that I used to see on occasion, but now I have one in my yard - Stokes' Aster.  It's beautiful and it's native to the southeastern United States, which even better!

First cactus bloom of the year.  After they are pollinated, prickly pear cactuses will produce fruit that turns a deep red in the winter.  It actually tastes pretty good, if there weren't so many seeds in it.

There are recipes for making jams and sauces and even daiquiri mix with it.  There are to many seeds in these fruit and it can be a little hard to handle because the juice stains very badly.

About the only thing I know about this plant is that it's called hidden ginger.  It produces these blooms on a short stem near the ground, while other leafy stems grow taller.  The main flower is pink, and there are smaller yellow blooms below it.

I've been trying for weeks to get a good picture of my hydrangea - thi is probably the best that it will get for now.  This is in the shade garden, and it didn't do well last year.  A few years ago, I moved it from the back yard (where it was blue) to the front yard (where it is pink).  Very interesting.

I just saw something growing out of the top of this Golden Barrel cactus the other day.  I assumed that it might bloom eventually, but not so soon!  Everything was status quo this morning, but when I left home in the evening it was blooming, and I had no idea it would happen so fast.

Speaking of the pond, this loom popped up recently.  It's a water hyacinth and it's an invasive species, if it ever escaped to another body of water.  But here in my pond it is contained.  There are too many in here right now that you can't even see the water.  They need to be thinned.

Friends dropped off a butterfly bush at my house recently.  I wasn't sure where to plant it, so it's been sitting in the driveway.  In the meantime, it put out its first bloom.  Thanks, guys!

Every day something else blooms, but this is going to have to do it for this month.  I'll get to work on next month's post as soon as this posts.  Enjoy!

Fourth Annual Fall Park Circle Plant Swap

It was that time of year again - time for the fall plant swap.  We had a lot of stuff going on this weekend and the thought crossed my mind that I might not have time to go this year.  Can you believe that?  It was only a passing thought - I came to my senses pretty quickly.  We have had a lot going on, and I procrastinated until this morning as far as pulling plants together for the swap goes.  I got up at 5am and was outside at 5:30 trying to get plants together, realizing that I couldn't see a thing!  I promptly went back inside and read the paper, ate breakfast and watched tv until 7am, when I resumed my activities.

I came up with a large pile of plants - more than I expected on such short notice.  Earlier in the week, I had dug up all the pups from our century plant.  This morning I dug up some irises and some phlox and potted them up.  I thinned out the water irises growing in the waterfall of our pond - it needed it.  It needs a good cleaning out and repotting, but that will have to wait.  And hostas - I have to explain the hostas.

While at the previous plant swap in April, I was in the middle of planting a shade garden and was looking for enough hostas for a mass planting.  I didn't find many at the swap, but I met a woman there that offered me some from her yard.  A week or so later, I went to her house and we walked around and dug up parts of almost every clump she had in her yard.  When I got them home, I broke them into smaller plants and had them in a couple of buckets of water.  I planted as many as I could and put the leftover bucket of hostas, dirt and water in the driveway, intending to plant them in the next couple of days.  Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months, and so I ended up bringing them to the next plant swap.  I wanted to tell her the story, but she wasn't there.  I did save a clump for myself - I still have plans to plant some in the near future, along with what I got at the swap.

I mention this every time now, but I don't find as many plants that I have to have as I used to, and it was trued this time.  Inevitably I end up doing more socializing in the beginning, rather than scoping out plants.  I see people who I don't see all the time and I end up talking to them.  I eventually find my first selection - there's usually one must-have plant - but I didn't see one today.  Just like last time, I found my groove - I changed my first selection from a Euphorbia trigona to a citrus I found after Darren mentioned that there were some mixed in with the rest of the plants.

Before I go any further, let me mention the plants I didn't get.  These were high-ranking choices, that got picked by other people while I was picking other plants:  Euphorbia trigona, night-blooming cactus, corpse-flower cactus, giant papyrus, canna and ginger lilies.  I think that's about it for the plants I didn't get.

I had a little trouble prioritizing this time.  Every other time Robin was there and, for the first few rounds, she would help me get the plants I wanted.  So I started out with the citrus and then I found some daylilies.  I saw someone with one of my friend Joan's Yuccas and I decided to get one of those.  I would have preferred Echinacea, but I got some of Joan's Black-eyed Susans instead.  I found some more daylilies - I wasn't sure what they were at first.  They were in a plastic bag and extremely leggy, like they didn't get a lot of sun, or they were over-fertilized with Nitrogen.  They reminded me of the Narcissus bulbs I brought previously - in their case, it was not enough light.  I got some Persian shield and a couple of beautyberrys to add some native plants to our landscape.  As always, I feel satisfied by what I brought home from the swap, and the fewer plants mean that they won't be neglected because I don't know what to do with them.  I've already planted the Yucca and I know what I'm doing with most of the others - nothing should be neglected this year.  I would say that I'm happy about this swap and look forward to more in the future.

Daylilies

Before I had daylilies, there seemed to be so much hype surrounding them - all the different varieties, etc. So, last March, I bought some off of craigslist - they were just putting out new growth, so I had to wait with anticipation to find out what colors they would be.

Once they finally bloomed, I was a little disappointed. They were mostly yellow, some having touches of red on the edges. I tried to cross pollinate one last year, but I didn't get any seed from it. Oh yeah - another disappointing thing about daylillies? Blooms last only a day.

I've got a different outlook this year. I plan to catalog and label each of them, so I know what color each of them is - and maybe I'll try some cross pollination again.

Spring Park Circle Plant Swap

This past Saturday was the Park Circle Plant Swap. We had been out of town for spring break earlier in the week, so I didn't have a lot of time to get my plants together. I had a good idea what I wanted to take, but after our winter there wasn't a lot around to take. The morning of the swap, I sorted through the plants in the driveway, deciding which to keep and which to swap. I ended up taking some sago palms, Mexican petunia, wild garlic, dwarf papyrus, a few cactuses and a handful of daffodils. Oh, and some plant I got off the side of the road, divided and repotted. It turns out it might be a wax myrtle.

There were definitely a lot more people at the swap this time - it just keeps getting more popular. Unfortunately, the plant selection wasn't thrilling. I say that, but I should mention that the plants were a lot of what I already have. There was nothing I was extremely excited by.

I did get some interesting things - a loropetalum (a shrub that we probably won't plant and it will die of neglect), Chinese lantern, peppermint, sugarcane, daylilies, succulent (for the desert garden), dried apple gourd (for the seeds), and a few other things. In hindsight, it was a nice morning. I have some things I like - I think I just have too much to do in the yard.

Assessing Winter Casualties

Since the weather has warmed up so much, I've been meaning to assess all the damage that our unusually cold winter did to our plants. I will say that most things came back as expected. Daylilies are thriving, bog lilies and hostas too. Most of our winter casualties are not too surprising. I had a majesty palm I bought 15 months ago and overwintered it original in the garage. Temporarily I dug a hole by the pond and put the whole thing, pot and all, in the ground, intending to plant it later that year- I put it in the hole, because it kept blowing over. I was concerned that it was a little too tropical to be outside all year and I was right - at least this past year. It shows no signs of life.

Most of my original shade garden died back, including the ferns I got off the side of the road, the ferns I got from the woods and the hostas that I divided last year. After dividing it last April, I had four plants until the other day - I only saw one coming back, but as of now all four are back, and I'm glad. Another plant that's back are the ferns we got out of the woods last summer. They're sprouting again with more foliage than before.

Almost a year ago I rescued some sort of pine that Lowe's sells during Xmas - It's evergreen and they put red and gold bows and decorations on it like an Xmas tree. This pine had certainly been neglected, but it didn't look half bad. I repotted it and it thrived during the summer in the partial shade near the back of the house. When fall came, I tossed the African daisies that were in a planter near the front door and put this pine in it - I figured it would be something good for the fall and winter. After the cold winter we had this year, it just got burned and the needles turned brown. I just assumed it died from the cold, it looked so bad. At that point it wasn't worth saving.

Another plant you could say I gave up on was my Black Magic Taro. It sat all summer and fall in a tub of water in the driveway, waiting to be planted in the bog. Needless to say it didn't survive, if I'm writing about it here. While the elephant ears in the bog were coming back to life, I waited on the ones in the container to do the same, but no such luck. If I really want more, I can always get some from the people I gave some to.

Lastly, a few thing I got at the fall plant swap didn't make it. This always happens - usually by neglect, because I always have so many plants that I can't take care of. However, these were more winter casualties. Fairly early in the fall we had to bring in the "Black Pearl" ornamental pepper - apparently it doesn't like anything below 60 degrees. Our house is a death trap for most plants - ironic, isn't it? We just don't get much sunlight. After several years I've adapted to this. We have a peace lily, cast iron plant, a pteris fern and an African violet, and they're all doing fine.

Rain...Rain...Freeze...

We've had some strange weather in the past week - well, maybe not strange, but certainly a variety of it. We got several inches of rain during a couple of separate days this week. I don't think it's rained this much since July when we were on vacation. Part of our yard flooded like it always does during heavy rains, this time it was a good thing - it gave me a chance to see exactly where to put the rain garden I'm planning for that area in the spring. One of the plants I wanted to put in it was the Crinum I have in the bog. To my surprise, It looks like I have about six new plants from the three I started out the summer with. I'm glad I'll have extra to use in the rain garden. Another positive thing is the raised bed I built in the vegetable garden this year. While the ground around it was soggy, the vegetables were doing well about a foot off the ground.

I have potted plants all over the yard. Besides the houseplants spending the summer outside, I also have plants that I intend to plant in the yard as soon as I figure out where I want them. Most are in the driveway, but a few are behind the garage. I had to do something with all of those plants today, because we're supposed to have near-freezing temperatures tonight. Every time I've seen the weather this week, tonight's forecasted temperature keeps dropping - currently it's at 33 degrees - cold enough to do damage to some of my plants.

Probably the most important plant was the "Black Pearl" ornamental pepper Robin got at the fall plant swap. Originally, I had put it with all of the other plants in the garden area/future greenhouse, but after talking to Robin and doing some research online, I decided it needed to come in the house. Most other plants like canna, walking onions, bed of nails, devil's trumpet, society garlic, shrimp plant, hibiscus, Mexican petunia, spider plant, ajuga and day lilies, I'm protecting whether they need it or not - I don't know the cold hardiness of everything on that list. I am leaving a couple of things out, because either I think they can take the cold - like sago palms and daisies, or they are annuals or houseplants that I don't care about anymore like a half-dead spider plant or geraniums. I did remember a few other plants I better bring in like my night-blooming cereus, mother-in-law's tongue, and a couple of pots of small cactuses that I'm not sure are hardy.

The cold has a plus side too. We've been eating lettuce from the vegetable garden all week, the broccoli is really heading now, and it looks like the onions are doing well - now if I only knew when they will be ready to harvest...