Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category

Bought myself an amaryllis at Walmart back in October.  It was a special Pink Ribbon package.  The pot that came with it was as usual too small  but I had another one so that was okay.

Anyhow… it decided to bloom just in time for Thanksgiving.  Two GIANT blooms opened up:  they were larger than my face!

Everyone that came over did double-takes at the thing… is that a REAL plant?  Yep…  and pretty awesome.

Those blossoms have now wilted and been cut off, but it had 2 more buds…  So I’ll have flowers for at least another week.

Pies I made last week.  Yep, the blackberry pie on the left overflowed.  Made a big mess in my oven before I stuck a cookie sheet under it.  I forgot to take photos of the apple and pumpkin pies…. oh well!

This is all for now…  It’s daylight out now and commuter traffic should be easing up… I have shopping and errands to do.

hugs,

Vyx

We got a mild frost a little while back.  I was surprised, actually… usually we are totally safe when they say we are going to get a frost.

Not this time, actual visible damage to the tomato plants.   We’d picked the only 2 tomatoes close to being ripe, just in case.  The plants got a little damage, but not a lot, and they’ve since recovered.  They are also covered with green tomatoes.  Dang it.  I doubt any of those will get ripe, but you never know, so we are leaving em out there.  I don’t have anything I want to do with green tomatoes, nothing at all.

Anyhow.  I sold my muscadine grapes.  Crazy, huh?  I offered them on Craigslist and someone snapped up the offer… come pick them for a dollar a pound.  I told them I was considering pulling the plant out… and they said they’d come back next year for grapes, too.  So, I may keep the vine.  We will see.   I know I spent more on water than I got for the grapes.  Wasn’t expecting the dang things to smell like diesel fuel when getting ripe.  Still, a pretty good harvest for a first year vine, altogether about 30 lbs!  Sold 18 lbs for the price of 15, gave away about 12 lbs but said it was 10.  Picked a pound or so and juiced em… gave that container to the folks that came and picked and paid for the ripe grapes.  Heck, maybe I should just dig up the vine and give it to them!

I also sold my citrus tree.  I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about it on the blog, but I grew it from a seed.  Every winter I haul it in the house and try to kill it, and every spring I haul it outside and neglect it some more.  I’d never got it to bloom, and it probably should.  I advertised it on Craigslist a while back, got a couple emails, no follow up.  This time I got someone local super interested… bam, she was at our house ready to take it home.  Funny, I think she lives just across the little valley from me, on the next ridge.  I asked that if she got it to bloom that could I please have a photo?  I was happy my tree was going to a good home… it was like trying to place a puppy almost.

The neighbor guy that likes to hunt has been walking through our yard.  We give him access to the woods.  As far as I know he’s never actually killed anything… hunting is just a hobby that gets him out of his house.  He always starts off with bow season, then switches to guns when he can.  I doubt that gun he’s carrying now is legal, but I doubt he actually shoots anything anyhow.  He’s got 6 kids… he probably just wants some peace and quiet in the evening.  He’ll go all winter, as long as hunting seasons last…  and when I walk my dogs at least one dog will haul off into the woods and find him every once in a while, hah!  Hey, he =knows= I walk the dogs off leash.  BuddyMack has come home with the guys gloves… go way damn dog, have a glove…   and then here comes Buddy so proud and happy with his glove he hunted.  :)

I bought a bunch of  fall  bulbs and planted them…  lots and lots  of pink tulips, some red oxblood lilies and some yellow species tulips and my favorite fall blooming spider lilies.  I still haven’t found the bag of narcissus that my friend Jan gave me a year or so ago…  it’s like it grew legs and walked off.  Wasn’t the right time to plant them right then…  poor bulbs are probably dead now, but I still can’t find the dang bag.  She’ll probably never give me anything like that again… what, you just go and lose it?  One thing about planting this year…  I did the major digging and getting the weeds/grass out…  but when it came time to put the bulbs in, Ron came to lift the dirt out so I could have trenches to plant in.   I have to not just plant stuff everywhere I feel like it…  Ron likes to mow stuff down.  He’s mowed down a bunch of my iris because the grass grew up…  I think I’m going to move those iris so he can keep mowing that bit next year.

Oh, and I bought concrete block edging for some flower beds.  Not like building blocks… decorative.  When they mark down the blocks is the time to buy them… if there are any left.  I found one I could live with at 1/2 price, so eventually I’ll have wider beds in front of the house and they will have concrete footing and edging and maybe I’ll be able to keep more of the bermuda  grass out.  Plus pile in more dirt for the plants to grow.  We have plenty of dirt for raised beds…  and I may just go the way my Mom does, and do building concrete block raised beds.  Plant enough flowers and you can’t see em, so what the heck…  it’s another we will see thing…   I can’t go piling a foot of dirt on some of my other flower beds unless I want to go dig up my pink stargazer lilies…. I doubt they will survive if I pile half a foot of dirt on em.

The trees are really beautiful this year, but of course I’m not posting a photo.  Yeah, they are pretty, but to me that’s a sad thing… going towards winter.  I don’t like winter.  Just get rid of the leaves and be done with it, without giving me pretty colors that won’t help.  Blargh, not looking forward to winter.  Never am.  Changing of seasons is nice, but see… I want to go from spring to summer to fall and back to spring.  Let someone else have winter, thank you very much.  :)

Still not smoking, health still giving me fits here and there.  It’s like, you do something good for your body and your body repays you by breaking down somewhere else.    Eventually it’ll be better…  I hope!

I guess I’m almost caught up now…

hugs,

Vyx

 

 

 

Which is pretty darn funny considering what an odd spring we had.   Cold and way too much rain, then boom it went into summer.

Not going to complain when the clematis is blooming like this!!!!

I also noticed buds on my muscadine grape.  The one that is chock full of  ripening fruit.   I have the names (and where I planted the grapes) mixed up… either that or the dang company I bought them from mixed them up.  Wouldn’t surprise me, as they were NOT helpful at all when I wrote to them about one plant arriving dead.

So, my Granny Val muscadine is covered in fruit.  It has to be that one, as that is a scuppernong, a bronze or golden colored muscadine.  The problem with the fruit though… I don’t know if I can get past this or not… it smells HORRIBLE.  Like diesel fuel or something.  I’ve tasted a grape, but I can’t get past that smell to find out if the insides taste okay because the smell is overpowering.  It’s so strong you can smell it from 6 feet away!  Not appetizing at all!

Took more photos of the clematis….  let me just toss another one in here…  :)

I just don’t know what to do with the muscadines.  Should I pick them and freeze them and hope the smell goes away and that juice from them will be palatable?  Should I write to the company I bought it from again and ask them if it’s supposed to smell this horrible?  What kind of freaky grape did they sell me, anyhow?  Ron said maybe I’m growing my own bio-fuel, lol!  (He can’t smell anything though…  I can smell them from 6 feet away and he stuck his nose right into a bunch of grapes and couldn’t smell a thing.  Huh.)

That clematis though… it sure is beautiful.  There is a house down the road a ways that has 2 clematis plants which I always admire in the spring.  Their plants aren’t doing anything right now.  Huh.  Nothing at all, probably going dormant for the winter like they should be.  Mine is having one last hurrah before winter though…

We are going to be putting in an enclosed carport type building.  Big, as in 20×16.  Something to store the lawnmowers, grills, and other stuff like that in.  Ron is working to level the ground… by hand.  Which means he started out with a mattock, a shovel and a wheelbarrow.  But now he’s using the rototiller, a shovel and the big pull-behind wagon attached to one of the lawn tractors.  He’s moved a LOT of dirt so far…  has piled it all up in one spot.  I’m sorry that I don’t have any raised beds for him to fill…. but I can’t stop him working on that to build me a raised bed somewhere.  He’s out there working on it right now, in the dark… yep, in the dark.  Because he has a laser level, and he can’t see it to use it in the daytime.  So, in the dark.  I can just imagine all the cats going after that, lol!  The cats are of course helping him…  they always do, any project outside.

My tomato plants are still alive.  We may get some tomatoes this year after all…  if I can keep the dang caterpillars from eating them to death.  I’ve got hornworms, of course, but also some ordinary striped caterpillars.  They don’t do as much damage… or so I thought.  No, they don’t eat the leaves much, they go straight for the green fruit.  ARGH!  I’ve been handpicking the dang things off almost daily, but today I mixed up some liquid Sevin and sprayed the plants and bugs with that.  With my luck… and the way the poor tomatoes have gone this year…  my first tomatoes of the fall will start getting ripe just in time for our first big freeze.  :)  So it goes…  :)

Been having health problems.  Gallbladder attacks, too many of them.  Doctor gave me a prescription for something that didn’t help and I’ve had a lot of tests… ct scan, ultrasound and then a hida test and a ccr test.  I went and looked up stuff on the Mayo Clinic website, and yep, those horrible stomach aches I get could be from gallbladder… even to the pain between my shoulder blades!    So, the biggest thing is…  I need to avoid caffeine and dairy products, but also fats.  Great.  What do I drink in the morning?  Coffee with a LOT of half and half in it.  What is my breakfast?  Instant breakfast with some benefiber… milk again, and I buy whole milk because skim milk goes sour too fast.  Too much added fiber to the diet can also be bad, and what did I do in the midst of all these attacks?  Yes, added another daily drink of fiber.  Adding it slowly is okay, doubling it overnight is not so great.  I left work early Tuesday because my stomach felt like it was going to explode, and the pain was so distracting I was very careful driving home.  Then those tests Wednesday morning… I felt horrible… again had to drive carefully and just come home again.

Well, I got a call from the doctors office today.  According to the latest tests, my gallbladder is working just fine.   They can schedule me for a scope down into my stomach to look at it if I want.  I passed on that.  I’ll try to change my diet a bit…  but I’m not giving up my morning coffee just yet!  Heck, I get up at 4 am, I can’t do that if I can’t have coffee.  Oh, but eating apples is super super good for your gallbladder.  Guess what I’ve been craving and eating this week?  Yep, apples.  I love red delicious apples, but they have to be the small ones… I hate the huge giant ones.  Got a good sized sack of them at the grocery store yesterday.  I guess if I eat apples I won’t need to worry about the benefiber in my instant breakfast that I’m no longer going to be drinking.  At least my digestion seems to be back to normal now…  no more feelings of things going to explode inside me.   Gallbladder attacks are no fun at all!  And I really don’t care that the latest test came out perfectly normal… I was not imagining the pain.  A few diet changes, and well, I’ll hope for the best…  moderate changes, nothing too drastic.   Just a little bit at a time.  Maybe I’ll even lose a bit of the weight I’ve put on this summer…. summer is when I’m usually thin, but not this year.  Hah.

Well, as usual this has taken a lot longer to type out than I thought it would.  I have to go feed my dogs, poor things are starving because Mom is blogging!  They still won’t eat the sweet potato chips I made for them…  I’ve been tossing those into the pond with the bread for the fish.  Have a better idea for those sweet potato chips…  slightly steam them before putting them into the dehydrator.  That oughta make them taste better…

hugs,

Vyx

 

Warning:  this post contains graphic images of a praying mantis eating.   Close ups of bugs.

I’ve had LOTS of praying mantis this year.  I don’t remember ever seeing this many anywhere, any time, any year.  I did see a HUGE one last year, I swear it was longer than my size 6 shoe… but I was mowing at the time and it was trying to get out of my way and I was trying to not run over it.

Shoot, at my house I’d be lucky if I’d see a few trying to get in the house in the fall…  like other bugs, they don’t want to freeze when the temps drop.

This evening there was one walking back and forth on the edge of the truck bed that my husband is fixing up.  It kept looking like it wanted to attack us, it would reach as we walked by.  Then it got annoyed and decided to go climb on the roof of the truck, but was having trouble.

Well, I had a brilliant idea.  I’m sitting out there and flies are landing all over me.  Have a beer in my hand and have to keep it covered because of the flies.  So…

Pour a little bit of beer on the truck, move mantis back down there and watch her eat her dinner.  An all you can eat buffet, if you will.  I sat there and watched for a little while before I thought… Camera!  I need my camera!  At this point she was on her 3rd fly….

Anyhoo… here ya go… and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did…

That last photo is a bit blurry…  I’m still having troubles with my camera focusing sometimes.  It sure did all right on those close ups, though!  Zoom function worked well, so I didn’t have to try to get the camera close.

Oh, and just a reminder, clicking on any photo will enlarge it.  These are all set to 1K pixels wide.

Hugs,

Vyx

I’ve got grapes!  Not a lot, but enough to pick and maybe do something with.

I picked these Wednesday evening.   This is just from one vine planted last year… I have two vines of this variety and  the other vine didn’t do as well.  I didn’t even bother picking the few grapes on the other vine.

Some kind of white table grape… I was going to look up the name, eh.  I have a chart with what grapes I planted where, but I don’t remember what I did with it.  Not on the computer.  Oh well!  White table grape works for me.

The skins are tough, they didn’t pollinate well, and they probably didn’t get enough water.  Some are seedless, but some have seeds, which is weird.  I figure I’ll be cooking them up and putting them through the food mill anyhow, and freezing the juice/pulp for later use.  The flavor is kind of Meh…  they are grapes.

I also took a photo of the vine after I’d scissored most of the grapes off…  It looks pitiful, but that’s partly because of insect damage.

And yes, bermuda grass is right up there, poor grape vines!  There is landscape fabric and 3 inches of mulch under that grass, though… and a soaker hose for water.  I do the best I can with roundup on the grass…  wish the darn stuff would go take over the hay field, bermuda hay is better than “mixed” hay.  Stay away from my plants!

I wasn’t real hot about training the grape vines I bought locally…. I did better training with the muscadines, as they were smaller stems that weren’t all curved and such already.  I figure as long as I prune well in winter I can eventually train the others better.  I hope.  Heck, I know nothing about growing grapes except what I’ve read online and learned the last year or so.

While I was out with the camera I took a photo of some flowers I grew from seed this year.  Milkweed family, I guess.  Common name is Snow on the Mountain.  My friend Jan had some of these last year, and I had to have some too, so I hunted down seeds after she told me the name.  I hope they reseed well, although fighting the bermuda grass like everything else does here… well, it’s iffy.

I love the white and green variations, and so do the butterflies (and some wasps).  They aren’t as big of a draw to butterflies as I thought they would be… the purple flowered weed does much better with that.  I don’t care, I love how they look, they are different!

Along with table grapes I planted some muscadines.  One never grew, that’s why I have 2 of the white grape.  Another one bled to death this year after I pruned it… died all the way back to the root.  But it came back to life!  It sprouted out from way down on the stem and is starting over.

 

Now, it’s not as great as it looks…  all the lower part is the muscadine.  But along that top wire is my RED table grape which was getting 90% of the water this year until I figured out that the soaker hose had a split in it.  The red grape made a LOT of vines, but also some good clumps of grapes.  They aren’t quite ready yet, but that’s a grape thing.  Did you know that grapes don’t all get ripe at the same time?  You’d think they would, but a cluster of grapes are like anything else… some ripen earlier, some later.  You try to pick them when most are ripe.    I’ve tasted the red grapes and they are wonderful…. very flavorful.  Took a photo, too, of course, so you can all see how some are getting ripe and others are not.

Hmm, not such a great photo, but see how some are red on one bunch and another whole bunch hasn’t even started?  These are another locally grown table grape that I should know the name to.  I’ll find that paper or notebook… and then tell ya.  But in the meantime, I can’t wait for the red grapes to get ripe!  LOVELY flavor.  Still that same tough skin, but heck, that’s probably my fault.  I’ll eat some, I’ll cook up the others and mix it with the white grapes and have some strange hybrid jam.

Oh, but wait, there is more!  I said I’m growing muscadines!  The one muscadine that survived set fruit like you wouldn’t believe.  That beer flat of grapes?  That’ll be nothing compared to what I’m going to get from the muscadine.  Let me show you a close up of a cluster…  and the vine is covered with these clusters…

Of course these won’t ripen until really late in the season…  perhaps September or October, I’m not even sure.  I have a freezer for the early stuff, you know me, I don’t can anything in summer if I can help it.  Certainly not jams.  I’ll use up the white grape juice to stretch out the muscadine juice…  but yum yum!  I am really fond of muscadines, the flavor, that is.  They have tough skins like the other grapes I’m growing, so all that I can do is juice them.  Well, I know I’ll eat some, but that’s squish the grape out of the skin into your mouth, and then spit out seeds.  Like eating concords.  :)

Well, that’s all the story tonight… I’ve got grapes.  I apologize for not blogging as much lately…   it’s summer and I like to be outside.

hugs,

Vyx