(no subject)

[nonelvis]

As annoying as it was when the neighbors chopped down their giant Norway maple, leaving 8" holes in my yard and a (now deceased) colony of refugee carpenter ants in my house, the extra sun in the herb garden is making the flowers very happy. Especially the pyrethrum daisies:





They really are this amazing bright scarlet color. I love them.



This one wasn't quite the crop I was hoping for, but it was windy out, so I was lucky to get anything close to what I wanted:



I didn't even notice the tiny ant at lower right until I downloaded the photos! You can see him better in the large view.

And finally, a cat photo, because Mr. P was so asleep this afternoon he didn't notice when I got up from where he was leaning against me, much less when I zoomed in to take this shot. One of the only advantages of him having gone deaf in his old age is that now I can zoom in without frightening him off with the noise of the lens moving.

Comments

[syzygy-lj.livejournal.com]

I am always so impressed by your gardening skillz. I wish I had that kind of talent and/or patience. Although this year I did manage to find flowers to plant in pots on my patio. Don't ask me what they are, because I don't know, but there are white ones and little blue ones. I also have some heather, and citronella, mint and parsley.

Curse being in the shade all the time. It makes growing stuff really hard.

[nonelvis]

I'm going to let you in on my gardening secret: I planted a bunch of stuff when we moved in, and virtually everything since then has just been letting the plants do their thing while I beat back the weeds. Many of the plants I put in turn out to self-seed readily (columbines, yarrow, bergamot, echinacea), so the herb/flower garden mostly takes care of itself. I do need to find more stuff that flowers in June, though; right now most of it is a huge, boring mass of foliage.

I'm glad you found some flowers that will grow on your shady patio! Post photos when you can, and I'll see if I can identify them. And the mint will do fine regardless of how much sun it gets; it's indestructible.

[syzygy-lj.livejournal.com]

I was going to take pictures today, but it looked like the apocalypse outside this afternoon. We have so much smoke coming in from the forest fires that the sky was yellow.

[nonelvis]

DUDE, THE SMOKE MADE IT TO BOSTON TODAY. I thought the National Weather Service was joking when they had a little icon for "smoke" in today's forecast, but it smelled vaguely of smoke outside, and everything was kind of hazy.

That's one hell of a fire you guys have going up there.

[syzygy-lj.livejournal.com]

Given that forest fires happen EVERY DAMN YEAR, I'm surprised Quebec has any trees left. This one is unusual, though-- I can't remember the last time this happened.

[haineux.livejournal.com]

My wife gardens. As best I can tell, the method is to buy a $1 plant, dig a $10 hole, put the plant there, and see if it works. It probably won't, so try another place. Eventually, you figure out which plants want to be in which spots. (There are about 50 unique spots around our house, because of the shadows, and the wind, and the watering, and, for all we know, the psychic energy imprints of the dead mastodons that died there.)

Plants in pots have their own special problem: They often get a lot hotter, and drier, than in the ground. So you have to pick plants that can take it. It also helps to have automatic watering, and when it gets really hot, water several times per day. Or get a really really big pot.

Even with all this, all plants eventually die, and only "local natives" and weeds will reappear. (Note that mint and basil are actually weeds. The thing is, they taste really good.)

As you can see, the best plan is to find a weed you think is pretty.

[syzygy-lj.livejournal.com]

I have about 8 square feet of patio, which is under someone's balcony, behind a tree, on the wrong side of the building. I get like an hour of sun a day. I don't have many options when it comes to plants. My property extends to the end of the patio stones, so I have no earth to plant in. I have a couple of large plastic pots that I have planted some shade-friendly annuals in. The herbs were bought yesterday, but I haven't transplanted them into pots yet. I braved the smoky apocalypse to get potting soil and some bigger pots, and it turns out the hardware store up the way closes at 4:30 on Sundays (WTF?), and I got there just as the guy was locking up. If things are better in the morning, I may go then.

[nonelvis]

Almost everything I have is in the ground; I only keep a few annuals and the unkillable garlic chives in pots. This year, the annuals are some purple-centered daisies, a fuchsia, a fuchsia-colored geraniums, and some light purple petunias.

We had an azalea die off this year for no apparent reason. Plants are just ornery sometimes.