I love my fancy daffodil bulbs. I just never know which ones are which until they open up. I love those little garden surprises!
Garden Stuff
Signs of Spring
The almond blossoms just burst forth and the humming birds are flashy!
Weekly garden update
I’m really wishing for Spring and this is a bad time because I tend to plant to early hoping I can force it to come sooner. I planted some mild jalepeno seeds in some starter pots in doors. According to my calculations though it should be about right to get a head start on the growing season! I even have a bin all ready for it!!! I’ve learned that when you chop them up and fry them you can then freeze them. They make great addition to dishes all year round that way so no need to worry about having too much and having them go to waste!
I also bought a rose bush today at Costco. I’ve been wanting to replace the climbing rose I had that never really did well and finnally died. The only trouble is the wild root stock that it was grafted on to didn’t die and I have these ugly little wild roses. They aren’t really that ugly but in comparison to the hybred roses they just don’t measure up. I sure hope these are as pretty as what’s pictured but first I need to figure out where to put them. That wild rose as a LOT of thorns!
Here is a snap shot of my tomatoes starting to bush out in the aerogarden!
My weekly garden update
I’ve have had a garden hobby for several years now and had a blog devoted to it however maintaining that became too much with other things. I still love to garden and spend just as much time out there escaping from the chain of the computer.
Over time I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t for my area of rural California in zone 9 with hard rusty well water and hard clay soil. I don’t think you stop learning though.
I have two “houses” for gardening. One I call my flower/fern house with flowers, vines and other green things. It’s purpose is a little retreat to sit and watch the humming birds and other critters fight for territory. Read more
One survived!
I call this amaryllis my miracle flower because it’s survival is indeed a miracle. I have been battling voles in my garden for the past several weeks. I lost over half of my garden due to a sudden population explosion because of our mild winter here in California. They seemed to pop up overnight and devour the roots and all of some of my most beloved and nurtured plants. I tried all kinds of repellents and sonic spikes but nothing repelled them. I tried various traps but none worked except havahart live traps. Every morning and evening I was making truck runs to a near-by vacant field to release my catch. One of my beds of plants was a series of bulbs – a particularly tasty treat for these cute little fuzzy hamster like creatures! I saw one inch tunnels all around the base of this bud starting that was starting to swell and I thought for sure it was a gonner. I had really hoped to see it bloom and today I was greeted with the nice surprise that it did make it after all and today was the first day I had no voles in my traps! YEAH!
Along came a spider
For some reason this year I have seen a lot of garden orb spiders. They make some of the coolest webs but they are not much fun to walk trough at night. They’ve been spinning their webs every day and they can spin a 4 to 6 foot circle in little under an hour which amazes me. We also see to have an explosion of black widows as well whose webs are quite the opposite in beauty. They are tough tangled messes that just give me the creeps. The garden orbs on the other hand do not – still I freak out if one falls on me. This one was hanging above my head against a dark wall so I couldn’t resist trying to get a shot. I used a Nikon D200 with a hand held flash off camera triggered by the built-in flash of the camera.
A spider with an attitude!
I love these little crab spiders. They get on my sunflowers and blend right in with the petals. They will stick to one flower for the life of the flower and grab insects out of midair that fly by. I brought a cut sunflower into the house unaware there was a passenger on board. A little disturbed by the cutting down of its house it decided to move over to a money tree and take up residence on one of the leaves. There it sat waiting all day until I came along jamming a camera in its face. As you can see it told me what it thought about that!
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