The Flower World

Dr. Ian Malcolm tells us in Jurassic Park, that "life will find a way". Watching life find a way it's amazing. I have been watching videos on YouTube of people who know more about plants than me doing amazing things with trees. One of those things is rooting a tree branch. There are a number of ways of doing it. I won't go over them here, you can search YouTube for the stuff. THE DETAILS OF THE OPERATION: I cut a small branch from a Persimmon tree. I selected a branch I suspected was this year's growth or maybe last year's. I cut it in four sections. I then trimmed the bottom of each section diagonally to increase the surface area. I dipped that end on rooting hormone I bought at a local hardware store and stuck each section on separate small plastic containers filled with sterile growing medium which I also bought at the hardware store. I added water to the growing medium before I planted the sections of the tree branch in it. The plastic containers wer...

I said I didn't want to spend any more money on the orchard. In fact, I don't want to spend much more on the whole garden. My plan was to propagate some of the stuff already growing. I have Autumn's Joy for example. It has bloomed every fall since the day we moved in. I want more of it everywhere. I have this green-gray cover plant that is near impossible to kill and it spreads like wildfire. I want that in various spots in my front and back yard, preferably under controlled conditions. I have Lilly of the Valley. It has been growing without my help for 15 years. I want more. I even have a poor Honeysuckle that has been clinging to life under the most horrific conditions of neglect. It is time for the Honeysuckle to soar! I've already spoken about he Rose of Sharon bush (tree?) that has been sending volunteers for years. This is the year the Rose of Sharon regains it's proper place of prominence. Let's not forget about the Tiger Lilly that showed up one year a...

This post is not for people who don't believe the climate is changing. I want to grow a Persimmon tree. Problem is, according to the back of the little pocket of cucumber seeds I bought at the store, I live in zone 5-6ish and Persimmon trees are only supposed to be hardy (meaning they'll live through the winter) down to zone 7. However, some years ago, the people at Arborday.org said that my area turned into zone 7 in the 90's. Is it true? Well, how about this, we didn't used to have Armadillos around here and since the 90's, we do. Armadillos couldn't make it through Kansas winters. Also, the Canadian geese used to come and leave and since the 90's, they stayed. Lastly, we started getting Bald eagles nesting right here in our fair city sometime around the year 2000, presumably because the winters are so much milder now. Is this proof undeniable? Well of course not! I know less than Jon Snow does. And yet... I know of at least three (3) Persimmon ...

I wish so hard that I had taken pictures for this post but alas! you will have to take my word for it. I've always maintained that my property is magical. Years ago. when we moved into this house, we brought with us an old dog. She was smallish and going blind. We also brought with us a mid-life, large dog, all 120 pounds of him. Just before the move, while living at the old house with the extremely small yard (really small), the large dog crushed the small dog and practically bent her in half so that when she walked, her rear end was next to her head (really!). Dogs are amazing that way. The doctor said it was a waste of time to do anything for her. We decided to try anyway. Many dollars later, her rear-end was where it was supposed to be. The doctor said it was all for naught, that she would not be able to walk or run and that she would die as a result. Enter my new magical back yard. Soon after we moved into the new house, she began to walk. Not long after that, she was run...

I am so excited! I am finally realizing one of my long-time projects. I may have mentioned that at one time I grew 100+ tomato and pepper plants. I grew every heirloom tomato I could get my hands on, mostly to see which ones I liked. I grew many different kinds of peppers, including my beloved chiltepin. In addition, I grew potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, radishes, etc, etc; the list goes on and on. That summer, I became a slave to my small produce farm because you see, in August, when the sun in Kansas burns all your hopes and dreams and temperatures hover above 100F, you can almost hear, almost, if you listen carefully, all your plants begging for water. "Water! Please!" they implore; and you must oblige, lest all that work you did in the spring is for nothing. Now, I have seen people grow thousands of plants. Yes, they grow these many plants in carefully planned operations in covered structures with automated watering systems. These people spend a lot of money and...

I finally got to the thinning of the nectarines this weekend. Thinning fruit is time consuming and I wonder if it gets easier the more you do it. For me, deciding what fruit to thin was what took the longest time. They tell you that in a twelve inch long branch you should leave two to four fruit; the problem is that branches in a nectarine tree are not neat and straight and that nectarines, like peaches, grow in bunches. Nevertheless, I think I did a good job. You may not be able to tell by the picture but I thinned close to 500 nectarines, leaving, in my estimation, around 200 nectarines on the tree. While thinning the fruit, it became obvious to me that I shouldn't have neglected the pruning of the tree. For sure at the end of this season, I will prune my fruit trees. Next I will thin the peach tree which has about the same amount of fruit as the nectarine tree. Again, I wonder if it will be easier now that I have done it once. YARD RECLAMATION PROJECT OF 2019 This we...

I ventured into my yard after more rain and thunder today to check on the plants. Everything looks good. The peppers are good. The tomatoes are good. The potatoes are good. The cucumbers are dead. Dead??!! Yes, the beautiful row of seedlings that had sprouted looked like this today: If you look carefully, there are no seedlings in the picture, just the corpse of what was one of the 10 or so cucumber seedlings that had sprouted a couple of days ago. I suspect birds. I guess I will sow more seeds this afternoon and this time I will try to protect them with some kind of netting. THINNING FRUIT I also spent a few minutes thinning the nectarine tree. Wow, what a time consuming thing this is! I barely did three limbs in about 10 minutes. I have thirty or so limbs holding fruit right now. For the top branches I will have to use the ladder. Next I took a quick look at my peach tree. The fruit is not large enough to thin yet but I can see that it will take a while to thin as well. Th...

I have often said that gardening in Kansas is purely an act of faith. Sometimes, we go from freezing temperatures to the mid 80's in a matter of one day. Sometimes, we get an awesome early Spring making everything bloom only to be hit by merciless Winter weather afterwards that kills every bloom. The worst however, are the killing storms of Spring. The above picture is from the most recent storm to hit us. Below is a picture a friend of mine took in his house of the hail that storm dumped on us. He lives very close to me so this is a good representation of what fell in my yard. Luckily, my plants fared well after the attack so I hope for a little more time before the next storm hits. Thank you for stopping by!!

I have always wanted an orchard. I think my fascination with fruit trees comes from my childhood experiences. In the place I grew up, fruit trees grew everywhere, and in fact, one of my favorite things in the whole world as a child was to find an empty property, be it a house or a business, with fruit trees in the backyard. Yes, I know, I was trespassing but this transgression was benign in that I was only interested in the fruit left unpicked on the tree. Funny thing is, the fruit I was picking there and then is considered exotic where I live now, and the fruit I grow now was considered exotic back in my childhood desert. It was routine for me to find pomegranate, dates, quince, mango, guava, fig, orange, grapefruit, and lime trees. Tamarind trees were almost a nuisance and some fruit trees I climbed are unique to hot climates like the Sonoran desert. I remember my beloved guamuchil trees, which kept me fed many a summer. SWEET GUAMUCHIL PODS Thus, as soon as I had the yard spa...

A million years ago, when I was but a child, my father moved us into his aunt's house. My great-aunt's house had a large yard which was completely paved over. I remember my father breaking the cement at one end of the yard to expose the dirt under and plant some tomatoes and peppers and  herbs and such. I don't remember my father doing anything else to that dirt but clearing the cement pieces off of it and planting the seeds. It bears noting that I was born in the desert and that plants there grew quite well at all times of the year and that all you had to do was sow seeds and add water and something would sprout for sure. The point of this story is that my father just planted the stuff in the starved soil under the cement and he got plants to grow. As I was setting up the cage and as I continue to prepare the ground around the cage for future expansions I began to worry about the soil conditions in my yard. As it is, I live in the ancient sand dunes of the Arkansas river...

Sometime in the Spring of 2001, I awoke in the morning with a strong desire to grow plants. For a person like me at the time, this was as strange as waking up one day wanting to write Babylonian poetry using cuneiform writing, which is to say that I knew nothing about both. (In fact, I may have known more about cuneiform writing than I did about gardening). Undeterred by my ignorance I went to the local mega store across the street and bought a packet of pepper seeds. I believe they were Anaheim pepper seeds. I also bought a growing tray and a sack of potting soil. I sowed the seeds and eventually I got a bunch of leggy Anaheim pepper plants that grew crowded in containers on the South facing balcony of my apartment. Later, when I got married, we bought a house with a large yard and I expanded my operation to the point I grew one hundred tomato and pepper plants. By the way, if you want to have any kind of life, do not grow one hundred plants of anything. You will spend your days w...