Gardening
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Echinacea purpurea | Texas Native Plant Week
The purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, has been a tricky plant to grow in my garden. The deer love it! I don’t know how many times it has been chowed down on by those feisty rascals, but it took all summer and just in the past few weeks have the bloom stalks survived being eaten long enough to actually produce a bloom. We started these plants from seeds that I received from my mom. Pass along seeds and plants are the best as they always have some sort of story or memory attached to them. It probably would have helped if we hadn’t planted the flowers front and center along the…
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Bidens laevis | Texas Native Plant Week
A couple of weeks ago I was on the Native Plant Society of Texas webpage and somehow came across Texas Native Plant Week. The Texas legislature signed the week into law in 2009 and this week for praising Texas native plants has been going on now for several years. I’m sure there are events associated with this week, however I thought it would be fun to cover native plants in my yard and garden currently growing over the next seven days. I’ve got a great list of them and this week we’re going to start with Bidens laevis. Last year was our first autumn in this house and that’s of…
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Rainy Day Lycoris
It wasn’t actually raining when I took photos of these Lycoris radiata, aka: red spider lilies, a few days ago but this morning we’re receving a good, soaking rain. It actually poured heavily for an hour yesterday afternoon which helped in raising the water levels of the community pond we’re on. Not only that, I’m sure the trees and vegetation are happy with a lovely dose of rainwater, someting we’ve had a meager amount of these last few months. We were in Beaumont last year at a nursery just outside of town when we found a box of these bulbs sitting off on the side of the storeroom of the…
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Tomatillos
The purple tomatillos have decided to start fruiting which makes me happy. I’m hoping there is a lot of tomatillo salsa in my future! The purple variety is new to me and I haven’t grown tomatillos in many, many years, so this will be a relatively new experience for me. Have you grown tomatillos? Got a good tomatillo recipe?
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The Garden Is DONE! | A Video
Done! Come see! I wish I could invite you to have a cup of coffee and sit on the bench. If you know me in real life this is definitely a possibility if you come by to visit. I’m sorry for the brain farts a few times—I seem to have trouble focusing on what I’m saying and recording at the same time. If you can take 5 minutes out of your afternoon, click play and let me know what you think.
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Hive Inspection
It had been several months, really since we harvested honey that we’ve done any kind of good hive inspection. We’ve been in the hive a couple of times for small checks, but this time we needed to look to see if small hive beetle had completely taken over the combs and were hatching larvae. It could have been disastrous, losing our entire hive—they would just up and leave because the beetles might have been too much to handle. I was worried. Over the last two months I had been hoping that the bees would have put on several more combs of honey for winter and they haven’t. The hive split…
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Garlic Planting Season
Planting garlic isn’t a quick turn around for reward in the garden. Taking nearly eight months or so from planting to bulb up enough to harvest, it is one plant that makes you wait but the reward is always great. Welllllll….if your planting has gone well. So far we have never had a good garlic harvest, unlike my brother who seems to be the garlic king. Two years ago we grew garlic in the community garden we were part of, and some of the garlic bulbed but then the garlic just did not cure well. Last year I planted elephant garlic along the side of the house where our flower…
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Quercus falcata | Leaf Portraits
Feeling the need to be a little creative these days I decided to try doing leaf portraits, similar to the fruit and vegetable portraits I did last year. I’m actually planning on incorporating more of the tree into the portraits such as any interesting twigs, seeds, and flowers if they are available. I did this rough draft of a southern red oak from leaves I collected on the way to my car at my office. There were enough diverse leaf shapes that I thought they would be interesting. A couple of things I need to change up is to get a bigger white background. I thought I had a large…
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Magnolia Seed Season
It’s the season for magnolias to be fruiting and opening up to show their candy sized red seeds. This is our ‘Little Gem’ and all of the other species trees in the area are doing the same thing. Someday in the future our short 4-5′ tree will be tall and grand….someday.
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Gingers in the Garden
We have a new section of garden to plant and one of the areas includes a shady spot under our fig tree. Because that area is also semi-protected, being on the south side of the house, it means we can plant some not-so-cold-tolerant species like this ginger. Chris and I were dazzled by this ‘Dancing Ladies’ ginger, Globba winitii. And the same species, different variety, called ‘White Dragon’. I’m thinking we may end up trying to find some cold hardy ground orchids to put in as well, maybe a cymbidium or the like. But I’m loving the tinge of tropical and Florida that I can bring into our garden! Now,…