Gardening for Life

A Flower is Born

2010-04-21T20:18:00.000-07:00

Today I was taking pictures and saw a most amazing sight. I found a bud of white prickly poppy. I took a picture of it with my 18-50 mm lens. Then I decided I wanted to compare this picture to one taken with my 100 mm macro. I had to walk about 50 steps back to the car, change out lenses and come back. But when I returned, the flower had changed and was partly open. Then, while I took pictures, I saw it give a little shake and a push and open further. Finally, after about 5 rounds of this within in about a minute, it was open. It's last motion was to shake off a little piece of green covering that had been on the side the bud when I started taking pictures.

This is the bud. Notice that it has already broken out of the green covering and only a little piece is left.

The bud was already somewhat flat when I got back and went to thiis by the time I composed and focused the shot.

The next movement got it this much open.

Another shiver and push got it to here.

The next to last motion that I saw got it to fully open but the piece of green, seen on the bud was still attached.

The last shiver made the little piece of green drop off. I didn't see any more motion after that.

A New Year's Weekend of Gardening

2010-01-02T18:25:00.000-08:00

I've been helping my best friend, Natalie, of League City, TX, clean out her garden and dig plants that will soon move to a new garden in Galveston. We cleaned up a large flower bed in the front yard and then put new timbers around it since the pine tree that was part of the edging was completely rotted. This was a pine tree that fell down about a decade ago and has been hard at work ever since, forming the front edging of the bed. We also did major cleanup in the back yard.

Front bed after cleanup

We pruned shrubs and cut back last years growth on the perennials. So we had lots of material to chip up. I used her mulcher and got three big contractor bags full to go to Galveston to compost there before being used in the new garden.

Natalie had visited me this past Thanksgiving and taken home some pots to to use to move plants to the new garden. I begged her to take more pots, but she insisted that she had more than enough. But, in three days of digging, we ran out of pots and are using buckets, earthboxes and even bins to hold the plants she'll be moving.

Some of the Galveston-bound plants

More Galveston-bound plants

This Camellia lives in a pot and is ready to move

I am going home with at least ten pots of Natalie's plants including a Martha Gonzalez rose bush, turk's cap, snowbells, ugly shrimp plant (which in Houston blooms at least eleven months out of the year and is a major humming bird attractant) and cigar plant. This is my second load of plants f rom her garden. I also spent a few days with another friend and bought him a silverbell tree and a Louisiana azelea for Christmas and bought myself a possum-haw tree. It will be interesting to figure out how all this will fit in my little Honda Fit.

Some of my new plants

And I'll be starting plants from my garden that will grow well in Galveston. Exchanging plants with my gardening friends is one of my favorite garden-related activities. I love starting new plants from seeds or cuttings to share with friends. This is one of the many ways gardening enriches my life.

Winter Wonderland, Texas Hill Country Style

2009-12-06T08:38:00.000-08:00

Frostweed Ice

I had high hopes of getting some of the snow that fell in parts of Texas but only saw a few flurries. But we had our first freeze on Friday night and awoke Saturday to twenty-seven degrees. When the sun came up, I saw white at the base of the many frost weed plants and had to go out to play with them and take pictures of their beautiful frozen "cotton candy".

Frostweed "Cotton Candy"

Frostweed is also know as Indian tobacco, tickweed, and white crown beard. Its scientific name is Verbesina virginica and is in the aster family. Although it grows from Texas north and east to New York state, I never noticed it until I moved to the Hill Country. The first time I noticed it was when my daughter and I walked after the first freeze.

Since then I've found it is an important source of necter for fall migrating Monarch butterflies and is the larval host for Bordered Patch, Silvery Checkerspot, and Summer Azure. It is a good xeric plant and grows in sun to part shade. Here, in the Hill Country, it almost always is growing in the shade of escarpment live oaks. It is a good plant to mix in with other fall bloomers. And the seedheads add winter interest. You can collect seeds now and either plant them now or wait until after the last frost.

The Seed Head

I think the blooms are pretty and the dry seed heads add interest although the leaves and stems are coarse. I'm leaving some in them in back of my viewing garden to attract butterflies.They will also look good mixed with grasses that take part shade.

The Waiting Garden

2009-10-19T18:34:00.000-07:00

Some of the Waiting Plants

I stopped blogging this summer because I was in a holding pattern, waiting to move with my daughter's family to our their new house on one and a half acres. When I moved to Dripping Springs two years ago, I expected to be planting a LOT of trees as the kids bought seven acres that had only three trees. So I started collecting trees and shrubs.

Then they found they couldn't get a loan for a house on that property and bought a mostly tree covered lot. I changed my focus and started researching and collecting plants for dry shade and grasses to hold the soil on the sunny slope in the front yard.

All summer, I fought to keep the pots watered enough and to keep vegetables growing in three 4' X 12' raised beds. Then the electric company told us they needed to replace the pole in my garden so I had to open the deer netting and clear out Months went by and the pole was never replaced। But my neighbor's goats broke out a few times to come and dine on the garden and take down more netting. Deer started helping themselves to everything. Beans, zucchini, Swiss chard and lots of little shrubs, trees, and perennials were severely cut back or even pulled completely up. Many plants died.

Twelve 20-30 gallon pots of tomatoes were so scraggly that I just pulled them up. Several of my pepper plants, growing in Earth boxes, died or were pruned back so severely by the deer that they are only beginning to grow again. The eggplants are also history. I didn't get the fall tomatoes planted in time and they are now very few and scraggly. I'll probably only grow a few through this winter. So I was majorly disgusted with even thinking about gardening.

I started working on the new property soon after it was cleared. I moved soil, cedar mulch and hauleld compost from the old house to imprrove the soil and drainage. We have really deep soil here. When we dug the holes to set the corner posts, we had soil all the way down the three foot deep holes. But is heavy and really holds water so I’m raising all the beds. But I have lots more to make or finish before I can plant.

The T-posts and Fence Wire in the Mud

I got started building a fence before the rains came and got the plants moved. Now I've been in a waiting mode again because it has been too wet to finish the garden which is a resting place for six deer. And this past weekend, my fence building friend had the flue.

Storage Area for Soil, Compost\ and Worm Beds

This area needs a lot of work to build storage for soil ingredients, mulch, and pots. It is stacked here, waiting for a building project that may happen during the winter.

Future Viewing Garden From Out My Bedroom Window

I hope to have this garden in in time to have columbines blooming. But part of it is on top of the septic tank and we have to wait for the soil to settle and then add soil to get it level again. The area that will be a path to my garden is also waiting for lots more loads of soil.

Future Rose Garden Waiting for More Soil

This will be a focal point of my garden. It will be a raised bed, lined with stone with maybe a little stacked stone wall for a mutabulis rose to lean against. It will have a few easy roses and penstemons and other plants that need to be saved from the deer. Other parts will hold other flowers, vegetables, seedling grasses, and seeds and cuttings of native shrubs and perennials I'll start from seed.

Wafer Ash: A Perfect Garden Tree

2009-06-21T19:40:00.000-07:00

On one of my first walks in the Texas Hill Country near my new house, I found a curious but very pretty set of little trees with seeds in what looked like tiny transparent doll plates. I took samples home and found it was the Wafer Ash or Hop tree, Ptelea trifoliata. I immediately put it on my list of trees to acquire and took some of the seeds in their interesting little saucers to plant. Currently they are still in my refrigerator since I missed them when I took out the other seeds I was stratifying. Today I did a morning walk with my camera and captured it on film and remembered how much I liked it.

A row of Wafer Ashes

The wafer ash is a host plant for Giant Swallowtail and the Two-tailed Tiger Swallowtail, two species that occur in the Texas Hill Country, which made me want it even more.

It is a very undemanding tree and will grow in most kinds of soils and in most kinds of light from full sun to full shade. But I think it likes to grow in light shade the best as that is where I found it, growing under oak trees along a roadside. It only grows to be 5 -20 feet high and about 10 feet wide. It is also a huge range,from Quebec, down the east coast through the South to the Midwest and west to California. That includes zones 4-8. Sometimes it is a little shrub and other times a small tree.

The only drawback I can find about it is that the leaves are kind of stinky. But apparently you have to crush them to get the odor. And the small white flowers are supposed to have a rich citrus smell. This tree is in the citrus family, and has the family smell. The leaves are in sets of three - bet you already guessed that from the name – and are very beautiful in themselves.

Wafer Ash Fruit (samaras)

This tree has historical medical benefits and was used in place of hops by early settlers even though it has poisonous substances in it. I even found it listed as a food tree but would not recommend it.

Hopefully I’ll get some babies started to plant on our new property next year. There are many places where this tree will do well and support butterflies.

They are easy to grow from seeds. You can collect them in the early fall and plant them outside and let them overwinter. They should sprout the following spring. They will also grow from softwood cuttings taken now through October.

Texas Hill Country Tomato Review

2009-06-12T13:49:00.000-07:00

I’m harvesting all my tomatoes now and am ready to report my results with growing them.

All but two of my tomatoes are growing in 15-20 gallon pots. The other two are growing in an Earthbox. All of them are growing in a mix of about half and half potting mix and composted horse manure. This was a little too rich. This summer, I’ll probably use one-fourth vermicompost with the soil less mix. I just gave them their first additional fertilizer – a foliar spray of John’s Recipe Fertilizer, from Natural Gardener. My tomatoes are shaded after 4:00 P.M.

This is three days worth of harvest minus the ones I ate every time I walked by the basket.

Parks Whopper – so far a pretty early tomato and taste is OK. But the tomatoes are WAY smaller then they are supposed to be and the bush is shutting down. Taste is not exciting.

Roma VF – one of the best producers I have other than the Sweet 100’s. I’m growing them for cooking and for making Bruschetta. There are still lots of blooms on it as well as lots of tomatoes.

Sweet 100 Cherry– one of the most dependable and tasty tomatoes I know. This year I got my first three on April 30 and now get 25 or more a day from 2 bushes. They are covered in blooms and little green tomatoes so they will probably bear all summer. I only get about a third of them into the house. The others leap into my mouth each time I visit the garden.

Cherokee Purple – I have two bushes and they have started to bear a few weeks ago. I have a couple in the house now and have eaten several. They are another really delicious tomato. Last year, they bore all the way to frost with late afternoon shade.

Missouri Traveler – this is a tomato I remember growing decades ago. It is making the biggest tomatoes of all and looks like it is going to be a heavy bearer. It is tomato red. It is touted to bear in the heat.

Lime Green Salad – This is the first time I’ve grown this tomato but it is definitely going to be on my short list. It made a very stocky, healthy plant and was an early bearer. The tomatoes are yellow when they ripen but are green inside, making for a beautiful and tasty addition to salads. I’m afraid it is not very good in the heat but plan to make some cuttings to plant next month for my fall tomatoes.

Napal a Fiaschetto – This tomato is growing and bearing but not at the level of Roma VF. I think the fruits are smaller than they are supposed to be – I got carried away with my horse compost and added too much – but they are starting to get bigger. It is touted as being able to hold up to heat better than Roma can. I’m waiting to see if that is true.

Green Zebra – I had two of these last year and liked them for the interesting color. They lasted from spring to late October. The taste is okay but not fantastic. But this tomato looks like it is in decline and I’ve only gotten 6 fruits from it.

Improved Big Boy – This has the largest bush but so far, every fruit has had blossom end rot. Once the water got low in the earth box I’m growing it in, so that could be a factor, but not to this extent. I’ve thrown away maybe twenty tomatoes. Celebrity did that to me last year so I refused to grow it this year. I do think we need to find tomatoes that bear as quickly as possible so they don't run out of cool weather before we get a little crop and this may take a little too long. I also think I should have grown it by itself instead of with Razzelberry.

Razzelberry - I don't remember why I wanted this tomato. I am growing it in the earthbox with Big Boy and it is not successfully competing. I'll research it again and perhaps try again next spring to give it one more chance.

Oregon Spring – This is a determinate tomato and I hoped it would also be early. But I’m just starting to eat tomatoes from it. Probably won’t grow it again as I expect it will be finished in another month. I’ll have to do a test to be sure but I think I like both Missouri Traveler and Cherokee Purple better.

Texas Naturalized Tomato – I got this as a freebie from the Lady Bird Johnson Center. It is a grape-sized tomato and has just started bearing. It is fabulously sweet and I expect it will bear until frost. And it's just the right size to toss into a salad.

These are my favorite tomatos. From top left- Cherokee Purple, Arkansas Traveler, Lime Green Salad, and Sweet 100 Cherry.

Garden Recycling with Red Worms

2009-06-02T14:12:00.000-07:00

When I moved to the Texas hill country, I wanted worms to help me make compost faster. I was composting horse manure which doesn’t compost as fast as some of the other manures and I needed lots of compost to amend the soil in the garden. By the time I got around to ordering the worms, I found I could only get them shipped in the winter and early spring.

So this past February, I ordered a pound of worms. I re purposed one of the large storage bins we had packed our household stuff in to move it here. Worms need air and they make a liquid as a byproduct of their digesting garbage. This liquid needs to be drain off so the worms don’t get too wet and drown. So I drilled lots of one-fourth inch holes in the sides and bottom of the bin and set it on some left over 2 X 4’s to keep it off the ground and allow good drainage and air exchange.

Then I shredded paper – mostly junk mail, ads on flat paper, phone books,

and newspapers, and mixed it with my horse compost that had composted twice. That is, it composted a few weeks, then I turned it into another bin for another few weeks before mixing it half and half with the paper. I moistened it all and added the worms. I waited a few days to start adding the garbage and, at first, only used part of the garbage for the worms.

In two months, I was able to harvest worms and put the old vermicompost into a new bin. It still had a few worms and lots of worm eggs in it but I just put a lid on it and left it in the same shady place where my worm bin resides. I made a new batch of matrix with the shredded paper and composted horse manure and put the harvested worms back. Now, almost another two months later, this batch is almost ready for harvesting.

To harvest the worms, I just dumped the contents of the bin on to an a piece of plastic. Then I scrapped off the top layers, allowing the worms to borrow deeper and deeper until they reached the bottom. Finally I was able to have a pile of almost pure worms, which I gathered up and dumped into their new bedding. Now, almost another I can add the garbage from a household of four and they are able to keep up with their golden habit of turning it into really rich compost.

There are easier ways to harvest. You can just take half the bedding, along with the worms that are in it and put it to finish ripening in another bin. The worms will die and add to the to the compost. You can even buy a system that has a stack of worm bins. You just add new bins as needed and the worms can move up from lower to higher bins. You harvest the vermicompost from the bottom-most bin.

Worms are endlessly fascinating to children and my grandson loves to visit them. And soon, I hope, we’ll take a few fishing and catch some sunfish. Meanwhile they work endlessly to get rid of my garbage and help my garden grow.

Save an Ecosystem: Help Stop the Sale of Cypress Mulch

2009-05-27T14:36:00.000-07:00

Cypress Memory

This is the stump of one of the virgin cypress trees that were almost completely harvested in Louisiana many years ago. In the background, and growing from the stump, are the second generation of these slow growing trees that are now not regenerating normally.

I was at Home Depot, here in Dripping Springs, Texas, looking for some mulch to add to the soil I was making for potting up plants. I was appalled to see cypress mulch being sold here.

Many years ago, in Louisiana a coalition was started to stop the harvesting of Cypress trees, some as small as an inch in diameter, because people there realized that cypress trees were already being killed or not sprouting from seeds due to salt water invasion, ground subsidence, and competition with invasive plants such as tallow. And cypress trees are the backbone of the coastal swamps that historically provided the Arcadian culture with their living and protected the coast from the full fury of hurricanes, while also serving as soil catchers from flooding rivers, playing a major role in maintaining the swamp ecosystem, one of the richest in biodiversity and biomass in the world.

Ten good reasons to not use cypress trees as mulch:

Cutting down cypress trees for mulch is not a sustainable practice and are endangering them.
Removing cypress trees help to destroy swamps that protect Louisiana’s coast from hurricanes.
Cypress trees are not regenerating due to such impacts as coastal subsidence.
The cypress mulch industry is the main reason cypress trees are being logged.
The cypress mulch comes from very young trees, some as small as one inch in diameter so we are even losing trees that should mature in the next few hundred years.
Cypress mulch is not termite proof as some people believe. This was true of trees that were hundreds of years old when harvested but not of the very young ones being destroyed now.
Cypress mulch actually repels water, making it poor mulch.
Cypress trees grow very slowly so we cannot replant them and expect them to replace the ones lost to harvesting for mulch.
Much better and more sustainable substitutes are pine or cedar mulch.
You may already have a free source of materials to make your own woody mulch.

Besides not using cypress mulch, you can help save complete ecosystems by taking action against Wal-Mart, Lows and Home Depot. Click here to sign a petition letter to them.

http://saveourcypress.org/action-center/take-action-online.html

Alternatives:

· Help recycle cedar, shrub and hardwood cuttings by hauling home free, chipped-up mulch from some of the County Recycle Collection sites or get from tree trimers. (I sometimes get a load from New Braunfels. I also grew the best garden I had in north Louisiana after stopping the electric company tree trimmers and offering them a dump spot on my property. Then I put the fresh wood chips at the bottom of my double dug beds and added extra nitrogen on top.)

· Buy a wood chipper and recycle your own yard waste and that of your neighbors.

· Buy cedar or pine mulch which is a renewable resource.

Other Resources:

http://suncoast.fnpschapters.org/pdffiles/mulch.pdf

http://saveourcypress.org/

http://saveourcypress.org/consumer-education/cypress-mulch-brochure.html

Remarkable Plants of Texas

2009-05-23T17:09:00.000-07:00

I recently bought a wonderful book on native plants of Texas. It’s Remarkable Plants of Texas: Uncommon Accounts of our Common Natives by Matt Warnock, an Austenite.

Matt is an English professor and has collected information and factoids about common native plants, then formed them into compelling stories. For instance, he spends three pages on Plains Coreopsis and tells us that not only is it in the top twenty favorite flowers in our state, but is a current source of dye. Colors range from reddish brown to bright orange-red to gold and even green. The Lakota and Zuni Indians made a red drink from the plant. And some early pioneers added plains coreopsis to their mattress stuffing in order to repel fleas and bedbugs.

The book is divided up by plant types: trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants, cacti, grasses, vines and aquatics.

Matt gives the origin of the scientific name, common names, the family, a description plus the habitat and description, much like a field guide. But all this is subordinated to the story of the plant.

I’ve always loved the Osage orange for it's wonderfully graphic fruit. But until I read this book I never knew that the spread of this mostly ignored tree was due to commerce. It was considered a treasure because its wood was so hard and flexible and was so little affected by humidity that it made superior bows. Bows have been made from this tree since 1050 CE. Tribes as far away as Montana and Arizona would trade a horse for a tree. And the seeds were carried long distances and are now found in little islands across the country.

And the trees could be planted and trained within four or five years into a hedge that was “pig tight, horse high, and bull strong” They were used to fence in the prairie before an enterprising inventor used the Bois d’arc as a model for barbed wire.

I keep myself on a strict book limit and planned to get this book, read it, and then donate it to my library. But I keep needing to go back and read something again or share it with a friend so it has earned a permanent place on my bookshelf. And it makes for perfect betimes reading – riveting stories that end in a few pages.

Fire and Birdsong in the Morning

2009-05-20T05:11:00.000-07:00

The weather here in the hill country has been outstanding for the last four days. The nights are so cold, in the high 40s to low 50s, that we have a huge dew. For two days, I looked out to see a fire in the oak trees. The escarpment live oaks have lots of ball moss on them and the sun comes up really red and catches the down hanging limbs.

The blacked chinned hummers almost hit me in the face when I take the dog out just at dawn. They are always active early but seem frantic to eat on these cold mornings.Wild turkeys gobble off in the distance while the canyon wren magnifies its huge, operatic song by singing from the metal chimney opening on top of our house.

The cardinals are early visitors to the feeders and add their song to the morning chorus. The barn swallows are soon sweeping over the fields. The house finches, black crested titmice and chickadees soon arrive at the feeders and are heard calling and singing. The Carolina wrens soon join in. We have a pair of them and they are always singing or calling to each other. Later, the resident yellow-billed cuckoo starts calling with his series of clicks and glugs and, as the morning progresses, morning, Inca, and European collared doves come to eat and call from the surrounding live oak trees or the Arizona ashes.

I take my coffee out for a morning tour of the garden. It is fresh and clean and glowing in the early sunlight. My nightly visitor has been back, digging around and in my lettuce bed. I think it is a skunk or a possum. We’ve spotted both when we drive up late at night.

But now it’s time for breakfast before working on my new meadow area where I’m storing assorted grasses and adding sunflowers.

Recycling Paper Into Pots For Seedlingss

2009-05-10T18:59:00.000-07:00

I like the idea of using recycled materials in the garden. I don’t have to spend more energy to haul them off and paper and cardboard help loosen clay soil while newspaper can help stop weeds. I recycle my own pots and often pick up pots from nursery recycling centers to use but seldom have enough.

A neighbor’s sister is very active in community gardening in Colorado. She recently visited my Hill County neighbor and brought her two of the little wooden paper pot makers. She said they were easy and fun to make. I ended up with one of them and started trying to see what papers worked best. You should not use shiny paper but colored paper like the grocery store ads we get in the mail are fine. But the best pots are made from thick paper. The best paper I’ve found is some catalogs and the newspaper from Fredericksburg. Much of that is on real thick paper. I even made some pots out of phone books but I think it needs to be doubled in order to last at all.

But it is really fun to make the pots and for a hyper person like me, monotonous movement is more calming than just sitting still. My four year old grandson loves to make them also. The process is simple. Make a 31/2 x 11 inch strip and roll it around the pot maker. Then fold in the bottom. I find it is best to have enough to fold completely across the bottom on each fold. If you need to vent frustration, the next step is really fun. Just set the pot maker in the base and give it a rap to push the bottom up and seal it in place.

Then partially fill with dirt, add a seedling or a seed and water gently. These pots will disintegrate with heavy watering. They also have to be in some kind of a tray. And they dry out fast in the hot Texas Hill Country sun and have to be watered at least twice a day. But they can be given away and then popped into a planting hole or large pot and thus the roots don’t get damaged and the plant doesn’t go through planting shock.

I also shred paper to use as a substrate for my red worms. I open cardboard boxes and lay them on my paths in my garden, then cover them with mulch. Once I saw the results of mulching with shredded cardboard. A man planted two identical trees and mulched one with cardboard and left the other one untreated. . The one mulched with cardboard was one and a half times bigger than the other one. After a year, all that is left of the cardboard I put down in my garden paths is the tape which I gather up and throw away.

How do you recycle in your garden?

Greens for a Southern Summer

2009-05-10T12:01:00.000-07:00

One of the saddest things about gardening in the south is that we seldom can get tomatoes and lettuce at the same time. Winter is the time for greens of many kinds along with beets, carrots and garden peas; summer is the time for tomatoes, squash, field peas, cucumbers, and okra. This summer I’m trying to have greens for cooking and salads.

A few days ago, I put up 40% shade cloth over my midsized lettuce. This is my third crop. I ate the first crop all winter and shared with my neighbors. Then I planted a little red-leaved lettuce which is bolting and which I’ll pull up today. The final lettuce isn’t pretty – the stalks get about two feet long - but it stays delicious until a little heat turns it bitter and bolting. I had more lettuce up in the garden than I could shade and I needed the space for field peas- black-eyed and Crowder – and two other greens recommended for summer growing in the Texas Hill Country, Malabar spinach and amarath. So I transplanted most of the remaining lettuce into two big pots and moved the pots into a shady spot. They will get a little morning sun and then be shaded the rest of the day. I figure I can cool the soil back off by watering them late in the morning with my reasonably cold well water. And I’ll soon be starting more lettuce seeds under lights in the air-conditioned house.

In addition to lettuce, I’m trying to save my winter Swiss chard which is supposed to produce into our Texas summers. I harvested all the chard to cook with a sautéed onion tonight and then moved the stumps where they will get morning sun only. I added some horse manure mulch to the soil while digging new holes, then top dressed with a little of my vermicompost.

This morning, I planted five plants of red stem Malabar spinach. It will climb a trellis at the back on my northernmost raised bed and be very decorative while supplying me with delicious greens. I grew this in Houston many years ago and it was the only plant my roommates couldn’t kill when I went on vacation. So I expect it to do well here. We seem to be real dry in summer and have lots of days in the 90’s. (Since we’ve been in a drought since I moved here, I’m not exactly sure what normal weather is like.) I amended the soil with a little more horse manure compost and then top dressed with vermicompost.

This evening or early tomorrow, I’ll plant the Golden Giant Amaranth seedlings my neighbor gave me. This variety is supposed to grow to seven feet, look beautiful, and be good for greens when it is young and then make lots of seeds for eating when it matures. I’ve never tried growing it or eating it so it will be a new experience.

Growing Daylilies in the Texas Hill Country

2009-05-05T09:14:00.000-07:00

I love daylilies. They come in some many varieties and can look so different. I love to see them multiplying and then divide them. They are great pass-along plants and gardeners are always willing to share. Once you get some, you will soon be caught up in the network.

Viewing daylilies gives me great satisfaction. . I love to see the ruffles, the different colored centers and the wide variety of colors and color combinations. And I love how they look with other flowers, either spiky ones or ones with lots of little flowers.

The only problem I had with daylilies is that they bloom once and then I have to wait all year to see that variety again. But now breeders are developing varieties of daylilies that rebloom. I’m starting to collect these varieties, especially the small forms.

Daylilies are fairly low maintenance. They like to grow in garden soil with medium water requirements and good drainage. . They will grow in sun to part shade in the south. I have never had to treat any daylilies for insect infestations or diseases. The most I do is pulling off the spent flowers. I mulch them which helps conserve water and keeps them cooler.

The first reblooming daylily I grew was the cute little Stella d’Oro. Mine ended up with my best friend who gardens south of Houston. My daughter lived in Massachusetts and her best friend in Louisiana gave her a few daylilies which she wrapped in a wet paper towel and put in a plastic bag in her suitcase and flew back home with them. By the time we moved to the Texas Hill Country, I was able to divide all the clumps and crammed thirty of them into a few large pots. . Soon we were giving some away to new friends. I just repotted them for the third time and most are in two gallon pots, and I still have about forty-five plants But now I’m good friends with two of my neighbors who now are growing my Stella d’Oros .

I’m trying Eye-Yi-Yi, Little Business and Pandora’s Box. Stella started blooming mid April. The first Little Business started blooming the last week of April. I’m anxiously waiting for my first glimpse of Pandora's Box and Eye-Yi-Yi. Both have buds so it won’t be long now.

So... got any extras?

Sunny Flowers for Rainy Days

2009-04-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

Here in Dripping Springs, the gateway to the Texas Hill Country, we have been in drought conditions for the year and a half that I have been here. Today I’m seeing some of the most intense and longest storms of my limited history with this place.

Yellow and orange flowers seem more brilliant on rainy days. This winter, I planted a few calendula seeds in one of my raised vegetable beds - I practice square foot gardening there– and now they are taking over the bed. Their orange and yellow shades lighten up the entire garden.

Another wonderful purchase was a pot of orange and yellow pansies from Home Depot. I bought a hanging basket of them and divided the five plants between two planters. These pansies seem tough and ready to keep growing for at least another month. On cloudy days they glow with an inner light. Two volunteer pale yellow pansy plants showed up last summer. I moved the second one in the pot of the first one. Now my daughter’s yellow calla lilies are growing up through the pansies along with a volunteer golden California poppy. This might make for an interesting combo of shades of yellow in my new garden. Allowing plants to grow through each other makes for a much more interesting garden than having plants in sections by themselves.

Most of my garden is in over four hundred pots, while waiting to move to the new property, so mostly I have single species. But I can set up groups of pots to see how various plants look. Other yellow/orange flowered plants blooming now include Texas Lantana, a local native, the orange/yellow bulbine and Stella d’Oro reblooming daylily. These three plants look really good together with the day lily pitting a large flower against the smaller flowers of lantana and bulbine. Bulbine adds a vertical element since the flower stems grow tall. And I think daylilies will fit into the same water schedule as the other two plants even though they do better with a little more water.
Other yellow flowered plants blooming now include a minature rose and a yellow-orange iris that my daughter got in Massachusetts and then moved down here. These flowers brighten every day but especially take center place in the dark days.

Spring Travelers

2009-04-24T08:26:00.000-07:00

Being outside is supper exciting this time of the year. New flowers, birds and butterflies are waiting to be discovered each day. The spring migration is about to peak and each day brings new songs and exciting new birds to join the birds already sharing my garden. This winter I had some one hundred and fifty American goldfinches in their drab winter plumage. Now I only have a few goldfinches but some of the males are in their bright yellow plumage with their cute little black berets. The remaining pine siskins are strongly streaked with yellow. The resident cardinals look really bright and fresh. Titmice and chickadees are already breeding. The chipping sparrows are also wearing new bright rust hats. My one white crowned sparrow is also looking newly crisp.

A week ago, I looked out and saw brilliant blue birds in the yard. A look through the binoculars showed a pair of male indigo buntings. The next day I had eleven of them and when I looked at that flock, I saw a small gaudy bird – yellow, green, red and blue. It was the painted bunting which breeds here in the Texas Hill Country. Soon there were two males here. Now the indigos are gone but I still have at least one of the impossibly colored painted buntings. A few days ago, I spotted a large bird attempting to feed at one of the hummer feeders. A quick look through the binoculars revealed a Baltimore Oriole flashing his dazzling gold and black colors. Yesterday I was blessed with a blue-headed vireo who I caught beating a caterpillar to death in an Arizona ash tree.

Other visitors have included many clay colored sparrows , field sparrows, summer tanagers, and a Nashville warbler. The first black-chinned hummers appeared March 7 and now they are so numerous that I have 6 feeders up for them and they are consuming two quarts of sugar water a day. A few ruby-throated hummers occasionally join them for a day or two. These hummers will not stay with me in the summer; they like a place that gets much more rainfall. The black chinned hummers, on the other hand stay here in hordes all summer, guzzling sugar water and visiting all my hummer flowers.

Gotta run – I’m hearing a new bird song in the back yard. Then I need to finish digging my prairie garden and get the sunflower seeds planted among the grasses.