Bloom Day Stars

Not every plant can be a star, but carrion flower, Stapelia gigantea, comes close. I'm always excited to see this plant bloom and these flies seem pretty excited as well.

Falls rains are breathing new life into my garden and candlestick plant, Senna alata, is lighting the way. This plant has been an excellent performer for me this year and definitely deserves star status.

First blooms from new garden plants are always the most exciting. Sometimes you find some new star performers and sometimes the relationship is just not in the stars.

   

I planted this dwarf Barbados cherry, Malpighia glabra 'Nana', a couple of years ago and now I'm finally reaping the rewards.  The flowers will produce little fruits which are edible.  I've tasted them in another garden. They're okay, but they won't replace actually cherries anytime soon.

After waiting impatiently for my pass-a-long pond crinum, Crinum procerum, to bloom, I was finally rewarded. It was definitely worth the wait, but I wish the flowers lasted longer. I guess you could say this crinum is a shooting star. Thank goodness for cameras and generous gardening friends like Pam at Digging, who shared this pond crinum with me. 

Another first bloom for me this year is this Philippine violet, Barleria cristata.  Finding the right spot for this plant and keeping it watered was a little challenging.  But, voila, it all worked out! It's a little early to decide if this plant will be a future star in my garden, but it's definitely a great fall bloomer.

This impulse buy really panned out. Brazilian button flower, Centratherum punctatum, has been a star performer that has bloomed non-stop since I bought it in April. I have it in a large pot and couldn't be happier with it.  I'll take cuttings or try to overwinter it in the greenhouse, so I'll have it in the garden again next year.  

This is actually my second year with this cleome hybrid, Senorita Rosalita, but I think the Senorita and I will be parting ways. She just can't seem to hold up in our heat. I purchased 3 plants and the only one still hanging in there is the one in dappled shade. The lower part of the plant is completely denuded, but there's still a few flowers and leaves clinging to the very top.

Out with the old and in with the new. This Wendy's wish Salvia is a keeper and hopefully, a continuing star in my garden. It's cold tolerance is questionable for Zone 8, so I'll have to see if it comes back reliably in the spring. 

Behind the Wendy's wish salvia is cow pen daisy. I've grown this daisy before, but not on purpose. It volunteered in my garden one year and I was bowled over by it's non-stop performance even during the hottest, driest part of the summer. This plant is a star for sure and yellow to boot.

I've had pretty good luck with purple coneflower, but the white one is not cooperating. I thought I lost it, but it's struggling to make a come back. Coneflowers are so pretty. I think it's worth a little extra effort to help this little guy become a star some day.

  

I hope you found some new star performers for your garden this year.

Happy Bloom Day! Please join May Dreams for a list of other bloggers celebrating October 15th with gorgeous flowers from their gardens.

Plant Escapes

Some of my garden plants have escaped captivity and have run off to live on their own. The amazing thing is that they did it during the drought with no supplemental water or help from me. 

Out in the uncultivated areas of my property, I'm seeing some plants that have the capacity to survive and even flourish. Oxblood lilies are pictured below. I have no idea how they got here.  This little spot in the woods is quite a distance from where I actually planted oxblood lilies in my front garden. They look quite lovely in this natural setting.

These oxblood lilies are even further away from my cultivated gardens beneath layers of dead cedar trees. Isn't that amazing?

After the discovery of the oxblood lilies, I started looking around and identified several of my garden plants whose offspring had escaped back into the wild. This pigeonberry, Rivina humilis, seems to like this spot among the trees and weeds.  Ironically, the pigeonberry in my garden doesn't look half this good.

I have no trouble growing scarlet sage, Salvia coccinea, so I wasn't surprised to see it taking advantage of thinning tree canopies and dead bramble vines.

This rock rose, Pavonia lasiopetala, and prickly pear cactus look quite at home in this woodsy spot despite never having received an ounce of water or a bit of care from me. 

This lantana is a hopeful sight along the back fence.  Even though it's surrounded by dead trees and brush, it's huge and blooming beautifully. 

Inspiration comes from strange places and at unexpected moments. Right around the time I discovered these woodland survivors, I found a wonderful blog called the Plano Prairie Garden, and met with a representative from the Native American Seeds of Texas. These chance encounters gave me an idea. You might even say an epiphany.

I'm going to expand my wildflower meadow and create something more.  Here's the very first picture taken after Richard used the tractor to trace out the beginning of a path.  With wildflower seeds in hand and my mind brimming with ideas, I'm off to have some fun and create!

Wide Shots for October 2013

The wide shot is an angle that you don't see on many blogs, or at least you didn't until Xericstyle in San Antonio started encouraging bloggers to share their wide shots.

Why don't we bloggers publish wide shots? Well, for one thing it's hard to hide the garden hose and the dead plants we haven't cleared out yet. For another thing, it's difficult to tell what you're looking at. Green plants meld into one another and flowers look like little blobs of color from far away.

Still, the wide shot has it's merits. The wide shot gives you a better glimpse of the over all design, structure, and spacial relationships. The challenge of the wide shot is to do a thorough cleanup of the area, or forgive us readers, you shall have to see our dirty laundry.

Since I've never posted wide shots before, let's take the full tour. Driving down the street, it's pretty obvious that someone at this address likes to garden.  But where's the house?

Gates open.  Come on in.

The sunny garden to the right of the driveway is overgrown and out of control.  I love it!  It looks great from my kitchen window, but up close I can see a lot of work in my future pruning back all the annuals and woody perennials.

I know these are supposed to be wide shots, but I couldn't resist this one of the candlestick plant, Senna (Cassia) alata. The candlestick plant is one of the larval hosts to the cloudless sulphur butterfly. The plants were visited early in the season by the caterpillars.  They munched them pretty good, but you'd never know it now.

Looking to the left side of the driveway, you can glimpse the house.

Oh, there it is! I knew there was a house there somewhere. When I get home, I feel I've reached an oasis. The sounds are peaceful. The wild birds are abundant. Our bird feeders, which can be glimpsed in this photo, sit in the middle of a wide open space in front of my kitchen window. The reason for the feeders location is two-fold. First, I can see the feeders perfectly from inside the house and second, the wide open space means the squirrels can't perform aerial dive bombing maneuvers from the trees.

I think the reason most bloggers steer away from wide shots is all the stuff and clutter that is part of life.  My 4 gallon Ground to Ground buckets are drying on the cement driveway pad along with bricks staged for the completion of the garden wall.  Our little used basketball hoop and rain water collection tank round out the less than attractive photograph subjects.

Ah, this is a much better perspective.  Just a smidge to right and light on the zoom.

This wide shot is from the rear of the garden looking back at the house.  The fire pit can be seen on the left.  Way in the back, the storage shed, which looks over the vegetable garden, can barely be seen.

I hope you've enjoyed these wide shots and will visit Xericstyle for links to other bloggers who are posting their wide shots this month.

Waiting for a Sign

I've been waiting for a sign.

No, not that sign.  This sign.

Yes, the weather is about to change! Will we get rain? I sure hope so.  Looks like the chances are pretty good, and look at the shift in the temperatures. It's still plenty hot, but I see some 80's.  It's starting to look like fall.  I'm taking this as a sign that it is time to plant the winter vegetable garden.

I've been preparing for the winter garden since August when I started lettuce, chard and rutabaga seeds in the house. Those seedlings are coming along nicely.

Lettuce Seedlings

Chard Seedlings

For those vegetables that I generally don't grow from seed like broccoli and cabbage, I'll need to buy transplants. As soon as vegetable transplants are available in the nurseries, I pot them up in one gallon containers, so they can start building larger root systems. These little guys get only morning sun and a free wagon ride when they need a lift to a shadier spot.

I was getting a little impatient for a change in the weather, so I started my carrots on September 8th. In the warm soil, the seeds germinated in about 5 days.  Keeping the seeds moist is a challenge, but shade cloth helps to keep the soil from drying out too much.

I was excited to find some artichoke transplants back in August, so I snatched them up. They also went into the garden on September 8th with the assistance of shade cloth.

For more information on fall/winter vegetable gardening, please check out my appearance on the Central Texas Gardener where I recently appeared as the in-studio guest.

Another valuable resource for vegetable gardening is the Travis County Vegetable Garden Planting Guide.  Use this guide to help you determine the best time to plant the vegetables you love.
 

Happy winter gardening and don't forget the BT!  Those hungry caterpillars like those cooler temperatures and your tasty veggies.

Don't Hug Your Cactus

Cactus need love too. Just don't hug them or love them too much. In my garden, love generally means fertilizer and water.  Since cactus don't need much of either, I suggest fluffing their gravel or just saying a friendly "howdy" as you walk by on your way to water some other more needy potted plant.

As we've struggled with the drought here in Central Texas, I've satisfied my desire to collect plants by adding more cactus.  I started thinking about growing cactus in all those tough spots where other plants just couldn't cut the mustard.

One of those tough spots is the western exposure of my house.  The space provides the harshest of environments; full on sun against a brick wall.  I've tried lots of different plants in this area over the years and nothing can quite stand up to the reflected heat of July and August.  Nothing until I planted cactus.  Even in pots these guys don't flinch.  I could have planted them in the ground, but the pots will provide some flexibility to move them out of the way when the AC repairman comes a calling.

Just a few feet from the AC unit temperatures moderate thanks to some nearby trees. These plants have it much easier.  In the pot pictured below, horse crippler, silver dyckia and echeveria are growing happily.  I added plenty of perlite to the potting mix to keep the soil well-drained and topped the pot with decomposed granite to make them feel right at home.

Until I recently met Mr. Bunny Ears, I would have said the dyckia was the most unhuggable of all the cactus-like plants. Dyckia are actually bromeliads with barbed hooks on their leaves that catch you both coming and going.  The spines are so sharp that a little routine maintenance will leave you looking like you just fought off a herd of wild felines.

One of the things I love about cactus and agave is their ability to add interest when combined with soft leaved plants. On the left, two agave parryi pups consort with the very slow growing Queen Victoria agave. The cool blue of the agave striata on the right works well with evolvulus glomeratus 'blue daze' in the tallest pot.

On the edge of a bed where sprinkler coverage is hit or miss, I added this little berm of gopher plant. While not exactly a cactus, euphorbia rigida is very drought tolerant and needs little water. Now if I can only keep the vitex trifolia 'purpurea' growing behind it from swallowing it whole.

My latest exciting acquisition is this manfreda 'silver leopard'. Sometimes called false agave or spice lily, this plant is very drought tolerant.  I purchased two of these little lovelies to replace some ill-fated bottle brush shrubs that never had a chance in this drought. 

Considerably more hugable than most cactus, silver leopard, also has more to love. Spreading by underground rhizomes, this colony forming plant will provide plenty of little friends, so you can spread the love around.

I know this drought is tough, so maybe it's time to embrace cactus in the garden.  Just don't hug them, and a little eye protection would probably not be a bad idea either.

Wordless Wednesday: The Summer Strainer

Has summer strained your gardening enthusiasm?  Fall is right around the corner.

Bunny Ears

Bunny ears are sweet, velvety and adorable.  You can't help but want to touch them.  So, what sort of sadistic person decided that a diminutive form of Opuntia cactus should be named for something so soft and cuddly.

I'm warning you.  Don't try to snuggle up to Opuntia microdasys also known as bunny ears cactus. It doesn't have spines, but it has a thorny part which is more insidious. On each of the pads are clusters of tiny glochids. These glochids seem to jump from the plant onto your skin and clothes.  If you've come in contact with them, you'll know it. Glochids are like a paper cut you can't quite see. The tiny barbs are very irritating to your skin. If you're lucky someone with good vision will help you remove them with a sharp pair of tweezers.

Apparently, Opuntia microdasys cacti are not named for the softer side of bunny ears, but rather for the fact that the pads grow in pairs; just like a bunny's ears.  Thank goodness someone on the web cleared that up for me.  I was really starting to wonder about these cactus growers.

I recently purchased two bunny ears for my cactus berm. Everything on my berm is growing fine without any supplemental irrigation except for my blackfoot daisy.  I don't want to drag a hose out to the berm location, so out with the daisy and in with more cactus.

While searching for my new berm inhabitants, I discovered two related opuntias that I decided to grow in containers.  The first, Opuntia microdasys 'albispina' is also known as polka dot cactus and the second, Opuntia microdasys 'rufida' is sometimes referred to as cinnamon cactus.

These Opuntia are cute, but I would definitely recommend handling with care. I know I won't be confusing these cactus with bunny ears any time soon.