A year or two ago I purchased this gulf coast penstemon from a nursery. Or maybe I started it from seed. I honestly can’t recall at this time. But I’ve been watching the basal rosettes of this particular plant and several others and biding my time for blooms. Every so often the deer come by […]
Iris Season by the Pond
It’s been a good spring for the irises down by the pond. The species plants of Iris virginica have really thrived and grown into large clumps over the last few years. Chris has also been adding various cultivars of Louisiana iris as well and those have really added some color to the pond fringe! Don’t […]
Banded Hairstreak | Satyrium calanus
This is a video. Give it a few seconds to load…read and come back. Yesterday morning I finished doing the major weeding to one of our beds. It was the last bed that needed to be done and now everything is really on a maintenance mode—which means, continue going through and picking out the cherry […]
Tomato Season Begins
And by that, I mean I started tomato seeds yesterday afternoon. I had intended to move some mulch to the flower beds after Chris picked up a load for me yesterday morning but then he began doing some maintenance on his truck that took longer than he thought. Instead I opted to get the tomato […]
A Visit to Fern Plantation
Arachnoides standishii L to R: Jean, Cindy, Laurin, Andrea, Darla Fern Plantation’s owner, and me. A few weeks ago I was invited to join some other garden bloggers for a little mid-week meetup at a local nursery. No one had been to it before but I had seen it on Google Maps as it is […]
First Citrus Harvest
Finally, after all of these years of trying to grow citrus we are being rewarded with fruit! The oranges are from a tree I bought Chris when we were still living in our tiny rental here in Houston circa 2011/2012. The tree finally went in the ground when we moved in to the house and […]
Post Early Freeze In The Garden
Eastern Carpenter Bee, Xylocopa virginica Last week we had our first freeze, about a month earlier than is typical. Last year we had a mid-November freeze, which was also early and then we warmed right on up again through December and didn’t freeze again until January, I believe. Some years here we freeze in December, […]
Horned Passalus Beetle (Odontotaenius disjunctus) | Wildlife Wednesday
Last week I was out watering the plants on the potting bench when I spotted a beetle coming out of the compost pile. I had a hunch it was a horned passalus beetle and so I took a few photos and threw it into iNaturalist just to verify—I was right! I’d come across one at […]
July Garden Tidbits
I think this late blooming foxglove covered in mold sums up what the garden overall looked like in July. I was finally able to spend some time on the flower garden over this last weekend, weeding two of the beds and tidying up a bit. I started working on the garden path again after having […]
Oleander Aphids | Wildlife Wednesday
I’ve come to enjoy seeing the oleander aphids in the garden when they colonize the milkweeds and their allies. Of course they also feast on oleanders themselves but I don’t have oleanders so I’ve never seen them colonize on an oleander but then next time I am near one planted in a landscape I’ll give […]
