Do You Realize?

Green Thumb Sunday

The "famn damily" (Eldest's term) is leaving today; their visit was cut short by a death in our family. I was going to go back to Georgia with them for the funeral, but we all decided I shouldn't, since we all know how I feel about funerals. I've been extraordinarily busy playing hostess for three-and-a-half days. It will take me at least that long to recover and to wash all the dishes and towels that are now stacked, piled, and pitched all over every available surface.

So, today's Green Thumb Sunday photo is one I took for last week, but never got to post. It is of my gorgeous Kingswood Torch coleus. They're showing off, full of stalks of tiny purple flowers, and growing to enormous sizes. I love the contrast they provide to the hostas.

Identification, please.

Can any of you kind and generous souls please impart your wisdom regarding these nefarious bastards? What are they? How can I kill them without chemicals? Are they perennial (my guess, as they suspiciously look like a type of grass) or annual? If I don't dig my hand down four to six inches underground and remove all the little... spiky thingies... will they keep coming back forever and ever? Thank you in advance, dear readers. A blessing be upon whomever lifts this curse from my flowerbeds.

Green Thumb Sunday

I took a photo of my divinely scented jasmine yesterday. Looking through my photo library, I found an almost identical shot I took a couple of months ago. The photo on the left was taken March 4. The photo on the right was taken May 17. What a difference! One sad update: the baby cardinal in the nest in this jasmine died on Mother's Day.

Green Thumb Sunday

A lot is happening in our gardens this week. A baby cardinal hatched in our jasmine. The first two or three flowers on the jasmine have popped open.  

The first elephant ear has poked its head tentatively out of the ground:

The landscapers finished my weeding for me, and I planted a bed of annuals (Gerberas, zinnias, vincas, creeping phlox (which I suspect is actually a perennial)), full of riotous color:

A couple of close-ups, taken in the morning dew:

Update

Busy, busy, busy as a bee. That's me.

A few things that I have had going on:

• We're getting ready to start graduation invitations for Eldest. It took a week of online digging to find a company that offers grad invites made from recycled content paper. Although they could have stepped up with recycled content in the envelopes, I'm rather pleased that I even found these. I'd love to see a printing company step up with all-recycled-content invites and envies, printed with vegetable dyes.
• A thunderstorm night before last annihilated the gazebo we had just installed in the back yard (I am white girl extraordinaire, and sunscreen alone will NOT cut it); we hadn't yet put the bolts into the ground, and our famed North Texas wind turned the damned thing into a parachute; it flipped over our fence into our neighbor's driveway. AAAAAARRRRRRGH!
• We've finally hired someone to come take care of the rest of the digging, stump removal, and pea gravel installation around the pool. (We'd officially run out of places (legal or otherwise) to dump wheelbarrows full of dirt.) And cleaning out an irrigation pipe we've found while digging and the broken sprinkler pipes. And the sprinkler wires I may or may not have accidentally sliced with the Mantis last spring.
• I've been scrubbing grout in my tile floors. Completely gross job, with four cats and three dogs and humans traipsing on it (and if one of the dogs decides to "mark" something, those grout lines become perfect little river beds. UGH.
• I've planted our elephant ears and caladiums. Now the wait begins for weather hot enough to coax them out of the ground.

Those are the main things that have been occupying my time the last few days. What have you been up to, gardening or otherwise?

Edited to Add: The birdie who made this nest is a robin, and she has three eggs!

Green Thumb Sunday

EARLY MARCH:

MID-APRIL:

You Learn Something New Every Day

While considering plants for our large outdoor pots, we were thinking sago palms in one set and replacement Rum Runner hibiscus in the others. Then we remembered Marshmallow's tendency to snack on everything she can get her teeth on (yesterday she ate cotton burr compost like it was cereal) and decided maybe(!) it would be a good idea to check toxicity of these plants for dogs.

A quick Internet search ruled out sago palm; even a small amount of this plant will cause swift renal failure in dogs. But hibiscus is a different story. There are conflicting reports. Some lists of poisonous plants have hibiscus included on them, some don't.  And so it was that I sat on the phone for fifteen minutes with the ASPCA Poison Control Center. Nevermind that we had already purchased the hibiscus online. According to the ASPCA vet I spoke with, the hibiscus will cause some pretty severe gastrointestinal upset, but it is not life-threatening to dogs. We decided to proceed with the planting and place some chicken wire around the plants until they no longer seem like a novelty to Destruct-o-Dog.

So, that's what I learned yesterday. That, and hard manual labor outside with only dogs for company is not nearly as much fun as with a friend, with, say, speech capabilities and opposable thumbs and an innate revulsion to caprophagia.

A Tuesday Ten--How Does Your Garden Grow? Edition

Spring has most definitely sprung here in USDA Zone Seven. We've been working diligently outdoors sporadically for a week or so and for the last two days straight outdoors, planting beds, trimming branches, shoveling dirt and rocks, getting the pool ready to open for the year. Here are ten things we've been busy doing:

1. I finished splitting and planting my hostas in the mostly-shade bed, along with new companion plants for texture and color variation. We now have 7-10 different varieties of hostas, and I'm pleased to announce that all of them have begun to grow vigorously. For companion plants we chose 2 different ferns, one tall and traditional, the other lacy and low and clump-forming. We also added some beautiful coleus. (The jasmine in the photo below is the one that was pronounced dead a couple of years ago.)

2. We've trimmed and thinned the bushes and trees out by the pool. The crepe myrtles were out of control.

3. We've arranged an electrician to come out this morning to fix two of our outdoor outlets, the poolside lights, and figure out what damage Marshmallow did here (I'm surprised the fool did not electrocute herself):

4. Hubby's trying to grow tomatoes again this year, a Brandywine plant. The first year he tried was a miserable failure. When we didn't really know for sure which was the "up" end of the tomato cage, we should have called it quits.

5. I've finished planting my new bed full of perennials. This is the first time we've planted so many; we've planted one here and one there, mixing them with annuals, but it inevitably leads to neglected perennials, so I wanted to try a bed of all perennials. There's columbine, salvia, flax, candytuft, bee balm, and a patch of transplanted speedwell groundcover, to see how it will react to being moved (before I pull it all up willy-nilly and killy-killy it all). I've added a bird feeder and birdbath, (and look at the size of the birds we've attracted! Heh.) and I will hang a matching hummingbird feeder soon.

Along the wall (in the photo), you can barely make out the foxglove and Turk's cap. (If anyone knows what the low-growing bushes are, please let me know... we've forgotten, though we love them.) I love the foxglove, but I have to admit to an odd combination of a queasy, uneasy feeling knowing they are so poisonous to humans and a slight thrill knowing I'm totally prepared if I'm sent on any spy mission that calls for poison. I know I'll be suspicious of any herbal teas hubby presents me, unbidden, for awhile. Heh. Here's a closer view of the lovely, deadly foxglove.

6. Hubby has been diligently scrubbing and vacuuming, unclogging the pool filter, scrubbing and vacuuming, unclogging the pool filter, scrubbing and vacuuming the pool. I'm glad he's got the patience. I would have drained the pool and dropped some C4 in the hole long ago.

7. We've picked out new patio furniture and patio dining sets, all in metal, so as to deter Marshmallow from making a snack of them, as she has our wicker (and our electrical cords... see #3).

8. Middle and I prepared these:

There are two of them along the same wall as the chewed electrical cord. Any ideas for filling them? This took an insanely long amount of time to prepare, and we were insanely proud of them when we were finished. We dug a foot down into the clay soil, Middle pushing the wheelbarrow out to a vacant lot for dumping*, and then we filled the cavity with pea gravel. Let me see you grow there NOW, weed bastards! MUAAAAAHAHAHA! (That's the honest-to-Pete correct spelling, according to the Genius that is RedMolly.)

9. I just purchased some pretty lemon-zesty petunias and some fuchsia bougainvilleas for hanging. I will put them in my coconut-fiber-lined hanging baskets, once I trim the damn things down to size (I trimmed one... ONE... last night, and I considered it a great fucking victory half an hour later. Just three more to go.)

10. We've arranged a sprinkler man to come out to fix our broken sprinkler heads (and the wires that I might have accidentally sliced last year with the Mantis).

So, tell me how spring has sprung in your corner of the world. Are you planting, weeding, readying a cursed (in this case, pronounced KER-sed, two syllables) swimming pool? How are you spending your spring days out-of-doors?

*No, this is probably not even close to legal, so can anyone tell me what else to do with 20 wheelbarrow-loads full of dirt? We spread about 10 loads in the 3-foot "alley" between our privacy fence and the next-door-neighbors'. It's better than the cigarette butts they throw back there.

Photo Hunt Saturday--Twist(ed)

I wish this week's theme, Twist(ed), had come a couple of weeks later, so that my subject would be in full glory. My star jasmine's twisting tendrils are trained on metal obelisks on either side of our front door. In late spring/early summer, it erupts in tiny white star-shaped flowers whose visual beauty are surpassed only by their olfactory marvels. For a month, we are treated to the luscious smell of jasmine every time we pass through our front door.

One of these plants was, for all intents and purposes, dead about three years ago, the effects of a particularly nasty winter. I dug it up and hauled it to the nursery, where they pronounced it dead. Undaunted, I went home and replanted it and nursed it back on its long road to recovery. Today, it is only slightly smaller than its counterpart across the path.

In the first photo, you can see the vines twisting on their support. In the second, if you look carefully, you'll see the little bird's nest which has been built by some enterprising little feathered friend.

Scenes from a garden...

2006 was a glorious year for our garden. We got all but one bed (and our whiskey barrel) filled with plants and/or flowers, and they all did relatively splendid jobs of delighting us. These are some photos from that gardening season.

The whiskey barrel full of flowers, and some petunias that looked so much like peppermint candies I always wanted to eat one:

Our beautiful red pentas:

And then there were the hibiscus (hibisci?). Their name was Rum Runner, and they were marvelous in that they bloomed with one color palette in the morning, light magenta and deep coral. The bloom changed colors throughout the day, and by the end of the day it was almost a deep butter yellow with a tinge of pale orange sherbet. One constant was their fearless glossy crimson throat; it looked like fresh, slick blood to me. Alas, I made the mistake of forgetting to winter them inside, and they didn't make it.