Recently in Flowers Category

This morning I wandered out to check on the chard sprouts and was startled by an unexpected member of the kingdom Animalia.

The turtle is camped out next to the tomato/pepper bed.  See the pile of dirt behind it?  I'm wondering if the turtle is a girl and she's laying eggs?!  I didn't see any eggs, but I can't help but wonder.  Why else would she be digging next to my garden?

Here's a view of him/her from the other side:

I have no idea what kind of turtle this is, so I made sure to take a good picture of the shell for ID purposes. 

My husband's iris bloomed!

As usual, that isn't exactly the color that it appears to be in reality.  But in both the picture and the real world, it's complimented nicely by the red veins in the bloody dock that is next to it.  (It's in the bottom left corner.)   This iris is the variety Red Hawk, and we weren't expecting it to be quite so purpley. I noted that it is red for the same reason that we call wines "red" instead of "purple."  He wanted a red iris because it's pretty notable in the beginning of the video game Guild Wars.  Now that I look at a picture of the flower from the game, I'm thinking that the color match isn't so bad, after all. :)

The snow peas also have pretty little blossoms in a cool burgundy shade:

(If you look closely you can see that they're also under attack by some sort of bugs!  I didn't notice until I downloaded the picture - oops!)  I noticed that a few little pea pods have already formed.  Yum, snow peas! Those might be the first veggie I harvest this year. (If those bugs don't destroy the plants ...)

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to upload pictures.  These are two days old.  And now I'm so tired that I just closed the browser before saving this entry, so here I go again ...

This is what the bamboo looks like when bamboo sprouting season is in full swing.  When this picture was taken, it had been about a week since I mowed the grass, so that should give you an idea of how fast it grows.

Beans and peas also sprout quickly, but I'm OK with that. :P The butterbeans are exploding out of the ground.  I'd better hurry up and set up that trellis for them. 

Speaking of beans, peas are kinda like beans, and the snow peas started blooming today. Unfortunately by the time I noticed, it was too dark to take a picture of them. 

My husband and I are very excited about his iris.  (My husband wanted a red iris like the ones in the game Guild Wars.)  It didn't bloom last year, and I thought I'd have to move it.  I guess not, yay!

So far the tiny bit of petal that is showing looks black, not red.  Eh, black irises are cool, too. 

The tomatoes and peppers are coming right along, as you can see below.

A few more tomatoes have sprouted in the last few days.  I think two more Lollipops have popped up, and one more Gold Medal. 

The Thai Hot peppers are lagging a bit behind the other peppers, but if all goes well, I have a bajillion pepper plants, so I'm not really worried about it.

The white furry stuff is still hanging out on the surface of the soil.  I guess it must be some kind of mold, but I have no idea.

Today I planted the tomatoes and peppers.  I'm trying something different this year for the other seeds I plan to plant, and I'll start them later.

Tomatoes

• Lollipop
• Amish Paste
• Gold Medal

Peppers

• Jalepeno
• Cayenne
• Hungarian Hot Banana
• Orange Bell
• Thai Hot
• Doe Hill Golden Bell

I also tossed some dill and chard seeds into one of the big terra cotta pots - the one that had garlic and mustard planted in it until the squirrels came along and destroyed the seedlings.  Hopefully they will move along and leave the pot alone this time.  ... Maybe I'd better put some wire over it just in case. *sigh*  I planted them just in time because it rained again this afternoon.

Speaking of wire, I think that all of the tulips I planted have sprouted, yay!  I'm so happy to look out the front door and see them happily sitting around the mailbox. ^_^  (If something happens to them, I'm gonna be crushed!)

The daffodils are still struggling along.  I think they're not  getting enough sun because they're shaded by some nearby bushes and bamboo.  The tulips are growing a lot faster than the daffodils are.

Oh, I also wandered around and gave all of the shrubs a good squirt of liquid worm poop.

The daffodils are finally coming up!  The ones I planted in the Fall are about 2 inches high now.  The ones I planted the previous Fall ... some of them are about 2 inches high, too.  I'm afraid their leaves were cut too early. There are only a couple of them up so far, and I wonder if any more are going to come up.  Maybe they're just sleepy-headed like me. :P

The first hard frost of the season happened on December 1 at my house.  I think there were probably lighter frosts that took out some of my herbs, but on 12/1 I actually witnessed the frost on the ground and it killed the tulsi. 

But it didn't kill the dill.  I have a dill plant that reseeded from last year, and it survived the frost and is happily going about its business being silvery-green and fluffy.



One morning, I noticed to my horror that there is wire grass growing in the Tulip Fortress.  It appears to be poking through the ring I left uncovered by landscape fabric so that the tulips can grow through it. On top of that fabric-less ring, there is still 2" of mulch on top of the dirt that the stupid wiregrass had to grow through.  I also found a piece growing under the landscaping fabric that I wrapped around the post of the mailbox and secured with a piece of wire.  Argh!  So I guess I'll have to keep weeding that flowerbed.  I was hoping to avoid that.

The fall greens and garlic appear to still be doing well, but I hoped they would be bigger by now.   I'm ready to eat them!

Carrots, taisai (bok choi) and garlic

It took a couple of hours to drag off all the bamboo and grapevines that I cut down yesterday.  I guess what took the longest was paring down pieces of grapevine that I'm going to make baskets out of.  I also picked the bunches of ripe grapes off of the fallen vines - I ended up with a plastic grocery bag full.  I had to keep the bag closed up so that the local yellow jackets wouldn't set up shop in it!

I finally managed to get the second tea shrub planted. *whew*  Then I decided to go dig a hole for the butterfly bush.  I was nearly finished with the five gallon-sized hole when the shovel clanked onto what turned out to be some sort of drain line.  Um, oops.  So I filled that hole back in and am looking for a new site for the butterfly bush.  I'm trying to position it near the garden so that hopefully pollinators will wander from the bush to the veggies.

And I planted the daffodils. 

Gosh, I'm tired.  But I guess I'd better start picking through those grapes ...

I could see the squash blossom from the kitchen window this morning.  So I trooped out into the yard and took a picture of it.

While I was out there, I also took a picture of the buds on one of the Rose Gold potatoes:

I noticed that several of the Rose Gold plants are growing blooms now.

Things are starting to bloom. ^_^

I'm most excited about the blooms emerging on one of the Rose Gold potato plants.  Yay!  I guess they're making up for lost time.  I thought they would never sprout, but here they are, getting ready to bloom. Cool.

The squash plants look like they might be forming buds.  I'm not sure.  They have these little fuzzy green nodules clustered around the stem, so I'm assuming those are buds rather than new leaves.  But they could well be new leaves.

The Nikko Blue hydrangea is about to explode into bloom.  The "moonshine" yarrow is also beginning to bloom. 

In the herb bed with the yarrow is my poor little bloody dock plant that is being nommed out of existence by something or other. I think that if the culprit isn't mammalian, it must be a swarm of locusts.  Whole leaves are gone, only the red stems remain. *sigh*  Bugs are definitely chewing on some of the other herbs in that bed.  One of the basils looks like Swiss cheese, and so does the valerian.  Or is it the vervain?  Eh, I'm too tired from weeding now to go back outside and look. :P

The tomatoes are growing along slowly.  I think they're about 6" tall now.  Despite my impatience, I suppose it's a good thing that they're taking so long since I don't have their trellis up yet! 

I also planted some seeds today: Cosmic Purple carrots and Rossa di Milano onions.  Now I have to remember to water the onions every day, because apparently that's what they require.  High maintenance little dudes. 

The last of the seedlings - the tulsi, coleus, and balloonflower - are outside on the front porch to meet their fate.  I'm at a loss for what to do with them, so I figured I'd apply some tough love.  They are all "leggy,"   but if they survive the acclimation process, I'll go ahead and plant them.