Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category

Self seeding petunias and a lot of bermuda grass. Sigh.

Not quite thumb sized blackberry. When they get plenty of water, the berries get a lot bigger.

The berry hedge. That’s thornless blackberries.

A fuller view of the hedge. It’s pretty huge after just a few years. We’ve got a freezer full of berries and they aren’t done yet!

My tomato and pepper plants. See the black plastic? It keeps the weeds from growing and also conserves moisture. But I’ll have to cover it with mulch pretty quick to keep the tomatoes and peppers from cooking on the vine.

A different view of the garden, including my shadow. Makes my butt look big, lol!

These are my latest blooming sunflowers. I love them. So do the bumblebees.

One of the maroon and yellow sunflowers that started blooming earlier.

Darker orange yellow sunflower. It’s quite short and mixed in with the cherry rose sunflowers.

Same flower, different view.

A different view of the new bright yellow sunflowers.

And yet another view.

And I swear I’m going to kill someone at WP. This every 2 seconds draft saving is driving me NUTS.

My sunflowers have started blooming. So have my glads. The glads are great, altho the thunderstorms yesterday snapped a few… I broke those off and brought them inside to stick in with the zinnias my daughter bought at the farmers market. (that happened AFTER these photos, btw)

Reddish double sunflower

Still one batch of sunflowers that have yet to start blooming. The odd thing is that I thought I was mixing up seeds while planting, but from the looks of things I didn’t do that. My goal was to go all down the fence line, but I ran out of energy before even planting the sections I did. Was going to also plant cukes along with the sunflowers, but I didn’t do that, either… just as well, as my neighbor is gifting me with giant bags of cukes.

red double with flash in daytime

If I had planted cukes my life would not be my own! I’ve already pickled about 10 lbs of cukes!

a view down the row

As it is, the blackberries are keeping me busy. Have picked, with help, a couple of gallons so far. And they are just starting. Eeek!

maroon and yellow

My red onions are not doing so well, but that’s okay. Tomatoes are doing great, and I’ve got anaheim peppers and ancho peppers… but no bells yet. Those plants are smaller, but bushier… and blooming, but I guess it was too hot to set fruit.

Goldfinches did this trying to get at seeds

The best thing about the glads is that the hummingbirds seem to like them. I don’t know if they are getting anything from them, but it keeps them busy. Busy is good, otherwise they just fight over my feeders. Had to put up a 3rd feeder this weekend. Usually I have to have 3 feeders anyhow, but this year there just haven’t been that many birds. I know I need another feeder when they drain the favorite feeder in ONE DAY. Heh.

I wish I’d got better photos of the glads, but, heck, glads are glads. I’ve got yellow, red, pink with with and yellow centers and salmon colored that are just starting to bloom. I have to remember… don’t buy glad bulbs on clearance, I started out with something like 75 bulbs, but had to toss a lot of them instead of planting as they were no good. No sign of the purple ones, those must’ve been in the worst shape. Glads need a LOT of water… not only when you plant them, but when they start to bloom. A good 1/3 of the ones I planted have either died or are not doing well. I also got elephant ear bulbs on markdown… those sat there forever in the ground before finally emerging and now are thriving.

Also in the photos, altho not very well… volunteer petunias. Last year I had a wonderful batch of petunias in a window box out in the yard…. took watering every day, but did well. I moved the ones I found this year, but the ones in pots are not thriving. The two in the flower bed are doing better. Not sure if they are the same breed as the window box ones, I hope so. If I recall, I collected those seeds from Ron’s Mom’s house back when she still had flowers… hers always did well if they were weeded early enough. Mine are struggling with the grass, but still okay. Can’t even tell I weeded that bed 2 weeks ago. Sigh.

Not pictured: my self seeding four o’clocks. I know they can take over, but they are exactly what I need in the beds in front of the house. What surprised me this year is that the confetti four o’clocks came back. I figured that I’d just have plain ones this year. I love the smell of four o’clocks, wish I didn’t have to go stick my face in them to smell them.

Forgot again that captioning is not what I want to do, the formatting is wrong…. oh well!
Hope everyone had a fun and safe weekend!

Earlier in the summer a toad was living in between the front door and the storm door. We rarely use that door, so it was a pretty safe place.

But then he almost got stepped on and woke up too early. Since then he is living somewhere else. I suspect under the cat house.

This is where he sits every night unless cats scare him off.

He will in fact switch dishes if the cats bother him… there are 2 other water dishes on the porch. That’s gotta be a shock to a cat going to get a drink, lol! Ack, a toad is using my water as a swimmy pool!

An update on the baby birds: they are gone. I suspect Blue Jays raided the nest. Very sad, but it wasn’t a great place for a nest anyhow.

Drove over to Eureka Springs with my daughter this afternoon. Had a nice visit with Sara of Paper Odyssey, and of course bought a few things. I had a gift silk scarf for her, but then wanted to show her some others, and she ended up buying a big purple one from me… my favorite “galaxy” silk.

Tomorrow my daughter Sarah and I will dye a bunch more silk scarves. They are one of my best sellers at the farmers market.

Oh, and our neighbor gifted me with 2 grocery bags full of cukes. Nice slicer cukes. Looks like I’m gonna be making pickles. He also told me to PLEASE come over and pick veggies. He’s got a great big garden, but it’s just him, and there are enough veggies there to feed a small town of people. I told him he went a bit insane… but heck, it looks like I’m going to get all the veggies I can eat… and I’ll take some to the farmers market to sell. Will give Brent the money. I’ll have to get out there in the morning, tho… heat of the day is no time to be trying to pick veggies!

Well, this is all for tonight…. :)

Here is the nest. It’s in a corner of the front porch, you can see the top of the porch column.

This is a Phoebe nest. There has been a nest there for 3 years, but no one has lived in it… altho I always see a Phoebe Husband trying to move his Wife in there every spring. I didn’t know what kind of birds they were until earlier this month. It’s made of twigs, grass, moss, mud and I guess bird spit, lol! It’s stuck to that corner, not just sitting there…. glued in.

The cats pulled down the previous nest that this pair had decided to move into. The front porch isn’t exactly the best neighborhood for birds, with all the cats that live here. I moved the cat access… and this pair decided they liked the spot and built a new nest.

Well, they laid eggs, sat on em… and they hatched. I kinda figured some babies had hatched… all of a sudden Momma and Papa are flying in and out almost constantly.

So, to get a photo, I had to get a chair. It’s hard to see what’s what, but you can pick out a baby bird beak opened wide. They are fuzzy and ugly right now, and I can’t tell but there are at least 3, possibly more.

That’s from Friday. Birds grow like weeds… very quickly. Today I’m seeing the beginnings of real feathers.

Update Tuesday: I went to take another photo of the babies and the first thing I noticed is that one baby was out, just laying on the ledge. That’s NOT a big ledge, so after snapping the photo I very carefully put him back in the nest.

It looks to me like the poor things are really feeling the heat. It’s in the 90′s out there and no breeze to speak of. I turned the porch ceiling fans on, hopefully that will help cool them a bit.

Today’s photo….

They sure are ugly in a cute sort of way. :)

And lazy about updating the blog. Not a whole lot of stamping going on here with the weather cooperating so nicely. Lots more dye stuff, but as usual I don’t have photos.

Heck, it’s summer now. Time to be outside, not cooped in. But I do have some bits of news.

I got home a week ago from visiting my friend Jan over in OK. I’ve known Jan for about 10 years now, but only met her in person probably 8 years ago. She’s a fantastic artist, does a lot of carving and is so organized that she inspires me to become organized. I last visited her back in the middle of March. But before that it had been quite a while if we don’t count the couple hours flash visit when I had to take my son somewhere a few years ago.

Jan has been a long time customer of my LWI dyed shirts. So, when I went to visit in March I brought lots of shirts but a limited quantity of dyes, and not even enough jars and such to work with. If it had been just Jan and I, it would have been okay MAYBE… but we also had her friends: Pam and her daughter Amanda. Even though I knew Pam and Amanda would be joining us, I was ill prepared. But we still managed to dye things and have fun.

So, this time I did a dozen colors of dye, and mixed it all up before I went. Took buckets to work in this time, to try something different than the smoosh into jars method. Also took more blanks than we had buckets for, again I was a bit under the mark in buckets. We managed. (and I brought home some of the blanks we didn’t use)

Dyeing clothing wasn’t the only thing on the agenda, however. We also did some gardening. I brought a bunch new iris for Jan, and she dug up one of hers that didn’t bloom this year to share with me. I also came home with a lambs ear plant, a giant bunch of narcissus bulbs, a cutting of a houseplant that I call creeping charley, and a store bought geranium. Citronella geranium, haven’t seen one of those in a few years. I love scented geraniums! We just don’t have the quality of nurseries over here that I was used to in OK… altho perhaps we do have and just not in “my” part of the area.

First on the agenda was planting all the iris I’d brought. I don’t ever dig up the soil a lot planting iris… just give it a lift enough to tuck roots down. If I have to pull out grass… hopefully it’s weedy grass and not johnson grass. Jan didn’t have much grass to pull out of her flower beds, she keeps that nasty bermuda out of her beds. (something I find impossible here)

I need a flower bed like Jan has. We’ve got enough rocks around here to do that ring in rocks… even if they are little ones piled up, lol. Where to put it, I dunno… I can’t put it where I’d like to, because we have to keep places open for trucks and tractors… So I guess I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, and try to turn fence lines into flower beds.

Oh, a photo of Jan’s round flower bed.

(erk, sorry it’s so large on click, I forgot to resize before uploading)

I hope I’m able to go visit Jan again next year… to see all the iris blooming that I brought to her, and her wonderful patio she is having built. I got to see the pergola, it’s great. And of course to visit my bestest friend in OK. ***

Vyx

*** my best friend in OK right now is Jan’s dog, Simon, lol! Just kidding, but I do love her dogs… last visit Gander was my best friend.