Seriously?

They have somewhat of a joke here in houston that says basically if you don't like the weather just wait 5 minutes and it'll change. I was really never too aware of it until the season i started trying to grow things... About 2 weeks ago i was wanting to put on shorts and was turning on my AC in the car. Today, there's ice everywhere. Global warming wha? where? The whole melting of the caps and flooding most of the land would suck, but my plants would love the heat if they had anywhere left to grow :)

Quick note (b/c i know some of you are too lazy to read thru my whole post - you know who you are): heard a commercial on the radio this morning for some scotts lawn feed that went something like: "some feeds have sawdust in them, which does absolutely nothing for your lawn.... except make dollar weed laugh at you." in a super serious voice. It was very cute.

So anyway, I'm going to leave Michael's house this morning and i see ice on my windshield. I immediately thought: oh my god, my little plants! So the whole time i'm driving home i'm just worried that all my little sprouts are shriveled up and dead. Get to the driveway and there it is: ice on the roof. My heart sunk. I checked on all the plants and everything seems fine. I was especially worried about the hollyhock and the tomato sprouts that had come up recently. I am sooooo over all this cold weather. For serious.

ice i came home to. yeah, that's a black motorcycle seat.

ice on broccoli

I know, i need to transplant them already....

ice lining the sides of the spinach leaves (bit hard to see here tho.)











ice lining the sides of the lettuce leaf. It looks kinda cute.

On a side note... i came home a couple days ago to find that the dogs jumped on a table, completely ravaged the container i planted some cobaea vines (god knows where they are now) and they tore apart my peat pots with the angel trumpet sprouts and the bomaera seeds. I was able to find and salvage the 3 trumpet sprouts and hopefully they will hold all right. It's a good thing for the dogs that i dont know which one did it. But i think that this one was my fault b/c that container had fries and ketchup in it and maybe i didn't clean the underside throughly and they still smelled it so they were enticed to get into it. Still angers me that they took them out tho... Dogs will be dogs though, I can't really get too mad about it i suppose. See, I am gaining a little patients and understanding from all this. :)

Shade garden, tulips, plantings

Ok, I have a shady spot at my house and had no idea what to put there. Almost everything you come across that actually flowers has full or part sun requirements. So once i found out that Lilly of the Valley is not only cute but tolerates shade I had to have it. So yesterday i came across some and snatched them up along with some hostas.  All in all i got 16 lilly roots and 3 hostas (should have gotten an even number!!! i can go back). So then of course i had to plan out exactly how i was gonna plan it out. so here's what i have...

In the front are lilly of the valley in the middle, to the sides of that the flowering hostas (wolverine) and on the sides of that low growing coleus. Behind all that will be the Astilbe. For some ungodly reason i got a mix of the coleus which i shouldn't have (i think they were clearance at the time) but i'm going to pick out only the colors i think fit better with the bed - taking out all the vibrant reds and oranges and putting them somewhere else. Only the yellows, greens and deep deep reds will stay. When that devil of a company park seed finally gets around to sending me my astilbe i'll direct seed it in. The coleus i'll have to transplant so i can get only the colors i want. The astilbe and hosta are perennial in my area if i'm not mistaken  as is lilly of the valley. the lilly has rhizomes so it can spread by itself. maybe later i'll get some pink ones to throw in there too. They're supposed to be very fragrant so that'll be a definite plus. I'm wondering if i should throw in some shallow rooted, low growing seeds in there with it so they wont look so sparse... i'll have to look into a shady seed that fits that bill...  I'll probably stick the hosta and lilly in later this week when the ground warms up a bit - the weather has been so unbearably cold lately, it's ridiculous. we'll see how they look together to see how i want to do things next year. 

Valentine's day was of course a couple days ago and the boyfriend got me some pretty tulips. They just started to peek open and let me have a glimpse inside last night. I want to try to salvage the bulbs for next year so i plan on letting them go all the way till the leaves go yellow and then pull them out and store them in some bags with moss in a dark cool part of the house. I also want to collect some seed pods from them and try to raise a few from seed to see how that works out. I've read that bulbs generally only last a couple of years before they exaust themselves so if i collect a couple seeds every few years i should have them forever. High hopes i know but i'm still going to try.

Planted some of the "exotic" seeds i bought today. I don't know quite how exotic they really are... Planted some white torch ginger (etlingera elatior), gardenia bush (Gardenia jasminoides) and some golden queen double datura vines (Datura metel). All from Trade Winds Fruit company online - great purchase btw, order came super fast and in nice condition. They have some wonderful things.

I have a grouping planned for the ginger, some green aster hulk, and some aqua sapphire tower. They are all odd looking flowers. I'll put up a seperate post about it later. The gardenia is going by itself in a seperate container i think. Very fragrant as well. :)

Ha ha, sidenote: the other datura-esque one i planted, the angel trumpets, one little guy is having some major difficulties. It looks like the top of the sprout still has the outer seed coat on it! Little one is just like trapped in there. I tried to be nice and soak the top of it in water to soften it up a bit but no avail... i dont hes gonna get out of there on his own. Darwinism at it's finest. I'm gonna have to do something though or he's a goner. His brother down there seems to be doing fine though.Well at least i'll have the one!

Ok, pulled off the coat, he's good now. What a dummy tho.

Park Seed sucks in my book

So I place an order with them on January 7th (today is the 15th of FEBRUARY) and I was checking my mail periodically, anxiously awaiting for my little seedling arrivals. ....and waited....and waited. So about the 3rd week I checked my order status online only to see that NONE of my (10 different seed) order had been shipped yet.

Now I understand, busy time of month and all, I get it. But I ordered clearance seeds, which are said to be so b/c they have a surplus of them - so obviously they have them RIGHT NOW, the time i ordered them. So i send them an email and after a week no response so at this point i'm pretty ticked. So i call the number and the lady tells me that some tomato seeds i ordered for my dad are on backorder... alright, so what? ship the rest of the seeds you morons! dont wait over a month and a half to not tell me anything, not respond to my polite email and STILL not ship my seeds. so irritating. you would think that they would do something nice since they handled it so horribly, but no... nothing, i dont even think she said sorry. you know that would have helped at least a little.

I will never order with park seed again. I know many do, but they are so tarnished with me. I would rather pay more for my seeds, get good service and get my seeds in a decent amount of time.

you know the bottom of my order even states: "Seeds, gardening supplies, hard goods, and gift certificates will ship promptly." HAHAHAHA so i guess "promptly" is over a month and a half...

Fuzzies

I never considered myself as much of a girl. I grew up mainly with my father and prefered to play in the dirt as opposed to playing with dolls. But i realize today that i'm either more of a girl than i originally thought or just a complete wuss b/c some bugs frighten the crap out of me. case in point: fuzzy black caterpillar...


i go outside to check on the plants today and go to walk down my concrete stairs and bam, there he is. there's a fuzzy black thing all curled up in a ball. What a caterpillar is doing on my concrete steps, i donno. At first i'm curious b/c you know, he's fuzzy and all. and that quickly turns to oh my god, he's fuzzy, ah! and cringing. I don't know exactly what i was thinking, but i got his little fuzzy self into a styrofoam cup. What i planned to do with him i donno but he intrigued me partly b/c of how he looked and partly b/c he kinda freaked me out. maybe it was a challenge on my part to attempt to not be freaked out as much. so go to find out what the little bugger is and find hims...that is exactly what the little guy looks like.

Turns out he's the larvae stage of a giant leopard moth. I was hoping he would be something cool like a butterfly but it turns out the leopard moth is actually really pretty in a huge catlike moth kinda way.
    It's very sad too b/c while i had him in the cup i heard this scraping noise and a shiver ran down my spine. Little guy was moving in the cup. Sooo very creepy.
   So i decided that he looked pretty cool after metamorphosis and i need to learn to not be so freaked out by him so i said, ok buddy, you're mine for the raising now. I don't know, maybe it's divine intervention that he wound up all helpless on my front steps, maybe this was supposed to happen....haha, no. But he was awful helpless just laying there and maybe he's super stupid and needs my help. Although if he's that stupid and wouldn't survive by himself maybe i'm hurting the gene pool more than i'm helping... thats a whole other touchy subject tho.
     So i got a big plastic container you store large cakes in and filled the bottom with fallen leaves, a few branched sticks and went and picked fresh green leave from a few different plants hoping he (or she) would find one of them tasty for the muching :) I was so jumpy too when i was outside! the wind was blowing and when things fell on the roof or around me on the ground i would jump a little bit. i cursed myself every time for being such a ninny. you know how when you walk thru a spider web you sit there and brush yourself forever thinking that the damned arachnid is on you somewhere? that was the feeling.


and here he is as an adult:

all the images are from wiki, check him out. His little caterpillar spines cause irritation and rashes so even tho he's furry i can't pet him :)


the insanely scary part is that it's said that he likes to burrow under leaf mulch so now that he's in the container he buried himself and i can't see him at all. i keep telling myself  niki, he can't escape, he's no Houdini. I even checked the whole container for caterpillar clearance holes (even the bottom: paranoid? me?). There's none but i can't help but still be slightly paranoid... 

I'm a Murderer...

well baby killer to be more precise...

I broke down and did it today - i thinned out the seedlings. It sucked. I really didn't want to do it b/c i mean, it's the first time i'm growing things from seed and you just get so happy watching them come up. i know what i planted is very easy to start from seed, but you still have this slight sense of accomplishment, you know?

So i walk out there to the bed and i crouch down and just look at them: all bunched up and huddling together so cute and tiny. i take a deep breath, slowly let it out and say to myself: alright some of you guys gotta go. and it begins.

the first couple of yanks were bad, i was kinda cringing thinking of what a murder i am. but then after that it got easier. i'm the kind of person that really over thinks everything so i'm sitting there making some metaphor out of everything. i'm thinking to myself, wow, i wonder if this is how serial killers start. i guess i'm a plant serial killer now, sigh. i was talking to dad telling him what i had to do and said "you know, i have to kill a few for the good of the whole". to which he just sipped his coffee made an aw-that-sucks face, slightly nodded and goes "yeah...". sarcasm at it's finest. you know, it felt like there was some war going on and i had civilians in a building with dangerous people and i gave the order to bomb the place anyway, like "it's for the good of the nation" (in presidential old white man burly voice). or like it was some war movie where one guy is wounded and he's all like "no john, leave me, save yourself" and john goes "i'll never leave a soldier behind, damnit!" and hoists him over his shoulder while mortars are blowing up everywhere - but in this case i would have gone: "alright, man, catch you later!" and just left him in the bush. my mind runs away sometimes. oh and btw, i hate war movies.

< thinned lettuce

thinned spinach and pea >

all the sprout casualties :( (left to right: lettuce, spinach, pea)

ok, so i did as much as i could stomach thinning wise. it says pea and lettuce is 2-3" b/w plants and spinach is 3-4". i got close although my 1" was more like 3/4" :) i just don't have the heart. but it was a good lesson on a couple fronts. Now i know, hey silly don't sow that many seeds unless you want to feel horrible for being a plant killer later. Also, for the tiny, dust-like seeds i plan on sowing them first (much thinner this time) in gutters outside and then sliding them into their permanent home in the ground instead of directly in situ to begin with (a trick i saw here on seedtoplate). although i refuse to pay that much for gutters. i'll find a cheaper alternative. Also, getting that close down to the ground to thin, i noticed 2 things: little weeds and termites. Now, i dont know how termites are going to effect things b/c they are not listed as a pest in any plant book i've seen. This could be that they don't inhabit gardens naturally and most people are smart enough to deal with and not put gardens so close to termites. Go me! I'll have to look that up though. 

i also noticed that the snow pea is not growing at the same rate everywhere. my only guess is lighting conditions (?) b/c everything else is the same across the board. i'll have to monitor how the light hits the bed during the day (i realize that the sun changes course in the sky depending on the season as well). i'm sure i could use this to my advantage for plants that would also prefer a little shade during the course of the day.

you can notice how the bottom row is taking off at the left side and not as much on the right. I'm a little perplexed b/c i would expect less growth from the top row since its closer to the wall. i donno...

One last thing: propagation is great.

the weather change is making such a change in the roses. I had a young bush (pink aromatherapy rose from jackson perkins) that i thought was a goner and bam! that thing is coming back with new shoots from the main stem. my little stems from propagation are coming along great.

YES, that is the same one from the 25th of Jan! believe it. completely amazing...

Gardening is not an Art...

Looking around today and found a link to an extremely helpful site by Tom Clothier. I mainly went there to look up seed germination temperatures but found so much else there. Don't let the simple layout of the site fool you, it's got a lot to offer. 


I love his philosophy on gardening too. When you look around at all these better homes and gardens magazines and just generic gardening material, they make everything so intimidating looking and make it seem as though everything has to be perfectly planned out and strategically designed. It makes gardening look like such a daunting task that it sucks all the pleasure out of it. I liked this excerpt from an article he wrote, found it amusing...

     "Each year, I add as many plants for restoring or maintaining Nature's balance as I add purely for ornament.  My computations indicate that my two acres will be completely filled with plants that do well for me during the 24th year of the plan.  There will be no grass left save that necessary to transport materials and escort visitors. Then, during that year, when I am no longer able to maintain the property anyway, I plan to win the Illinois lottery.  I will immediately hire a professional landscaper who will take stock of my thousands and thousands of plants.  He or she will then move each one to its proper place in the grand scheme of things.  Colors will be complimentary and appear in waves as the season passes. Better Homes & Gardens and Architecture Digest will be calling every day for an appointment. Martha Stewart will stop by for a chat, carrying a fruitcake made from recycled tires.  I will tell everyone that I have been at work here for twenty-five long years.  People will refer to my place as a "botanic wonderland."  Every visitor will be required to take home two or three potted plants or seedlings. They will be glad  --  and I won't tell them that by giving plants away, it is one of my strategies for dealing with pillbugs  --  I deport them."

He also basically says that different plants are just better suited for people and climates, so stick with what you're good at, get a different variety of the same species or family. Knowing that not everyone will be able to grow everything wont make me feel so horrible if i dont have as many successes as i would hope for. But while i plan to have a lot of plants that thrive, i cant help but want to try some of the more difficult varieties too (i bought some tropical/exotic seeds a while back!). I have to tell myself one thing at a time...


I'm still exploring the site but i recommend anyone who gardens to read it. I'm sure everyone would find something useful, if not amusing, there.


sidenote:

Look how cute! Saxifraga umbrosa. 

They are sooo tiny tho.   -->