Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Sweetie, dock, 3/31/2015

These are my favorite cherry tomatoes. They grow very tall and produce large bunches of super sweet fruit.

Clyde's tomatoes, 3/31/2015

This is on the last day of March. They are now halfway up their cages.

Cherry Cascade, back garden

I love cherry tomatoes. My wife does not like almost any form of tomato, so big slicers are wasted on her. But these little beauties are like having a candy store in the yard. Cherry tomatoes seem to be much tougher and disease resistant than their larger brethren and they produce farther into the season too. These were in little four-packs and already had fruit. Today, two weeks later they are already red and soon will be ripe.

New spearmint, back garden.

The plant in the center is a spearmint that I just got at Plant Ranch, my favorite nursery. The mint around the outside was also labeled spearmint when I bought it years ago. They are different enough for one label to be wrong. Anyway, both are good and I have a nice mint patch.

Lime seedlings

I have a lime tree and this year it produced a few limes. I saved 12 seeds and planted them in these cups and left them on the dock in shade. After three months, nothing. Then, two months later I happened to look and 6 of them had come up. Fifty percent is a huge success rate for citrus. We will see what these do.

Grapefruit blossoms, dock

This is usually a bad sign. When my citrus throws this many flowers it usually has a hard time choosing which will stay and loses most of them. We'll see.

Clyde's azaleas

My neighbor, Clyde, has a lot of azaleas and, luckily for me, they grow close to our fence and I can take credit for them.

Last of the bare branches, driveway

These are all leafed out now, until December.

Azaleas, near driveway

 South side
 North side
Mix

White azaleas, east garden


Last of the redbuds.

The redbuds drop flowers that are still in the height of bloom, no rot or brown. The driveway looked like there had been a parade there for two days.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Nearly the last Camellia blossom this year.


Provencal Sedum, dock

This is a common stonecrop, or sedum that I brought back from Provence by mistake. It was in my vest pocket from a walk. Sedum, being very drought resistant, had no trouble coming back here. I looked it up in plant directories and it is not a threat in any way, as the same succulent grows her. So, I put it in a little stone container on the dock to have a reminder of Provence every time I'm out there.

Janie's lopper, back garden.

At lunchtime here, we drop what we're doing and go eat;-)

Pernicious weed, Asian bed

I have a bed planted to four Asian trees, a Bottlebrush tree, a Loquat, a Japanese male and a Gingko. The ground beneath them had become choked with this invasive monster. Very soft and a lovely green but a rabid grower with no need of much soil. I finally tackled the invasion as you can see in the two posts below.

Asian bed, Before





Asian bed after





Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Redbuds, Front garden.

 Redbuds are an oddity to me. I have never seen a tree produce flowers in the same way. In early Spring little purple flowers appear along seemingly smooth bark and cover the branches. When the leaves start to come the flowers drop. Janie got our two trees at a Nature Conservancy sapling giveaway. They were tiny slips that I put in the ground with little hope of success. They are both healthy and tall, twelve years on.


Camellia blossom, west of house

Camellias make our winters more bearable from a gardening point of view. Just when all flowers give up and disappear, camellias burst into bloom around Christmas and continue for two months.

Clyde's garden

My neighbor, Clyde, is an avid gardener and those beds are his winter vegetables, now passed. He gave us a bunch of collards and I made stuffed collard leaves, wonderful. Collards are so good fresh from the ground. Much less bitter.

Hickory trunk, Winter light


Last Datura bloom before frost.

They went out in a blaze of glory, the week before our only frost.

Friday, March 27, 2015