Veggies, blooms, cute bugs and one lazy dog...

Our Mexican Mint Marigolds have started to bloom.  We noticed them starting to bud over the weekend and by Monday, we had tons of small golden-yellow flowers. 

~Yellow is my favorite color and one that we didn't have in the yard until these fall beauties bloomed. 

Our Fall vegetable garden seems to be doing pretty good so far and I'm getting really excited and hopeful that it will be better than our summer garden was.   

This pepper is a mystery to Jack and I.  When we bought our pepper plants, we thought be were getting serrano and jalapeno peppers, but somehow we ended up with two of these mystery pepper plants and two jalapeno plants. Well, whatever kind they are, they're doing really well. There's half a dozen or so that seem ready to be picked. 

We continue to have more Okra then we can eat.  We've prepared them every way imaginable and though we enjoy Okra very much, there's only so many Okra fritters a person can eat!  Next year, remind us not to plant eight okra plants!  I think just two will do.

~ A late watermelon. Only our second of the season and probably our last.

~Our Basil is growing like crazy! I haven't trimmed them back in a few weeks and as a result they've started to bolt (flower).  This is not a good thing if you want fresh, non-bitter tasting basil, but really good if you want to attract beneficial insects like this little bee who is enjoying our lemon basil plant.  

~some of the wildflowers Jack planted are still blooming

and our butterfly bush is looking better then ever.

 While I was snapping pictures of the garden and flowers, a group of Wren visited our backyard.  They were so tiny and cute; playing and chattering about.  In the picture above they're setting on our Bouncing Back tree and below they're exploring our corn plants. 

~ I found lots of ladybug pupa on our winter squash leaves.

It's pretty crazy to me that the ladybug larva and pupa are so ugly, yet the ladybug itself is so cute and colorful.  I took a few pictures last summer of some ladybug larva and pupa on our cilantro plant.  I never posted them, and can't get to the pictures right now (still no desk computer) but, if you haven't seen a ladybug larva and are interested in what it looks like or in the different stages of a ladybug, click here.

 ~I also found one cute, but lazy dog.

~I don't see how this could possibly be comfortable!

So anyway, I'm really pleased that our fall garden and flower beds are doing so well right now. The Mexican Mint Marigolds should continue to bloom throughout the Fall and hopefully we'll enjoy lots of garden fresh veggies from our garden during this time as well.  

I'll try to post more about our fall garden than I did about our summer garden (which was never!) but hopefully, I can get Jack to do it since he's the expert.  We'll see! 


Happy Wednesday!

Bouncing Back!

As you may remember from several of our previous posts, we've been pretty worried about our Mexican Plum Tree for months.  Six months actually!  Well, check this out....

Jack's hard work, research and patience have really paid off! We're finally seeing signs of life as new growth have started to sprout from the branches and the trunk itself is looking healthier. What a relief!

Jack and I planted the tree back in April and for about a month and a half, we watered it twice a day, every day. Our watering unfortunately tapered off as the temperatures climbed and apparently even native and hardy well-adapted types of trees for Central Texas can really suffer when enduring long periods of temperatures in the 100's with little to no rain. The plum tree is in a raised bed that we built to house it and some other heat and sun tolerant plants in the back yard along the fence. It slowly but surely lost most of its leaves and by the end of May the tree just looked pitiful. The bark on the trunk and branches turned a charred blackish color and most of the leaves and plums had fallen off. We just couldn't understand why it was in such bad shape.

Jack researched possible causes and talked with Oma from Oma's Garten Pflanzen in Killeen, Texas. She told him that even tough trees need supplemental water during the hottest times of the summer and that as a young tree, our little plum needed a good soaking at least once a week. Now, a good soaking means a soaker hose or a steady drip from the water hose for long periods of time – preferably over night.

*Ok, I'm going to let Jack take if from here to explain what else he did for the tree. It's best to let the guy with the green thumb talk about this part. I'm clueless!*
I tried the full sick tree treatment recommended by Howard Garret, The Dirt Doctor and other respected local natural and organic gardening experts in the area. Every week the trees leaves, trunk and root zone were sprayed with a mix of liquid seaweed, fish emulsion, molasses, and orange oil. Sometimes a drenching of alfalfa meal tea was also added. I also tried adding compost to the root zone of the tree heavily and more recently, added some organic fertilizer, Texas greensand and dry molasses to the bed surrounding the tree as part of our fall fertilizing regimen.

Honestly, I think all of this may have helped the little guy limp along but, only after a really drenching rain of 6-12" and a couple of weeks of considerably cooler weather did the tree bounce back in any noticeable way. We will do the best we can for it over the winter months and will likely cut back some of the upper branches during its dormancy. Hopefully, we will be rewarded in the spring with lots of flowers and new growth. I know that we will be sure that the bed is watered routinely and deeply throughout the summer next year and hopefully it will do much better. If nothing else, it will be a year older and a year tougher after this experience!

*Yeah, what he said! :) Seriously, do you see why I asked him to write that part?!  So anyway, we're obviously really excited that our Mexican Plum is bouncing back!

Well, hopefully we'll get our desktop computer back soon so that I can share the pictures of Madi's recent swim competitions and the other events I mentioned in my last post. But, in the mean time, I do have some pictures that I took in Austin on Tuesday while Jack and I were "playing hooky".  He took the day off from work and I took a break from school so that we could spend some much needed time together, just the two of us. We'll write a post about it as soon as I get the pictures loaded (onto a different computer and then backed up onto a portable hard drive, of course!).

Have a great rest of the week! The weekend will be here before we know it, thank goodness!

Ramblings...

I've been itching to write a post for a while now.  Mainly because it's been well over a month since my last post, but also because there's a lot to write about.  

Things have been crazy busy for us since Madi started back to school and I started my Fall Semester. Granted, I only have two classes, but one of them is math.  Math is not my friend.  Math sucks all the fun out of my life and gives me little free time for things like writing a post.  Madi also brings math homework home every night - even on the weekends.  Jack contributes by trying his best to help us both with our math work. This keeps all three of us from doing other things around the house, going fun places and generally having a life. Honestly, we are all sick of math!

Madison's Swim schedule has kept us busy the last two weekends.  She participated in the Round Rock Unclassified Meet last Sat., Sept.25th, in Round Rock, Texas. And yesterday, she swam in her first ever Middle School swim competition - Belton Middle School vs. Lake Belton Middle School.   I would love to share pictures from both of these events, but I can't.   The computer that I loaded the pictures on crashed (again) last night and so, I can't get to any of my pictures. Ugh!

I also have some pretty good shots of our nephew, Jason and his middle school football team, The Cavaliers, during their football game this past Tuesday night.  I can't get to those pictures either!  Once the computer is fixed (and hopefully it can be fixed) I'll post the pictures from all these events.

My Mom and sister, Virginia, both celebrated a birthday the week before last.  I have pictures but again, I can't get to them. Pretty darn frustrating!

Jack's Mom and Dad celebrated their 40th anniversary on the 17th but, we have no pictures for this historic date but, congrats to them, again.

We also have an update on our Mexican Plum tree. That will have to wait too I guess.  

So, all the above ramblings are my excuse for not updating our blog before now. Well, that and the fact that my husband is absolutely worthless when it comes to updating this blog (he wrote that so, it's okay)  :)  Hopefully, I can share pictures of everything in the next few days or in the next week.  Depends on the computer situation.  I could really kick myself right about now for not listening when Jack tells me to back up my pictures!  As much as I hate to admit it, he was right!

Yesterday evening I found a beautiful lacewing butterfly hanging on the underside of a Okra leaf and snapped a few pictures of it.  Luckily, I had not loaded these pictures on to the computer, so I do have a few pictures to jazz up this post a bit! 

Hopefully, I have redeemed myself somewhat at this point.  Y'all enjoy this beautiful Sunday!  

Colors of Summer and a Sunny Farewell

Back in April, Jack created five perfectly placed flower beds in our backyard which he  decorated with pretty, wildlife inviting plants like; Butterfly Bushes, Hummingbird Mint Gomphrena and Butterfly Weed. He also added a few culinary herbs that are enjoyed by wildlife and us including; Italian Flat-Leaf Parsley, Cilantro, Dill, Rosemary, Sage and other’s that I just can’t remember the names of. He also placed wild flowers, which he had painstakingly “raised” (for lack of a better word), from seed, throughout the beds. His hard work in raising the wildflowers really paid off! They are beautiful and have been in full bloom all summer thus far.

Anyway, in addition to all the flowers I mentioned above, Jack planted some Giant Sunflowers which he also raised from seed. I was the most excited about these and couldn’t wait to see if they would be “giant” as promised on the package! Then, to finish out our beds, Jack and I planted a few trees. We planted the largest tree, a Mexican Plum tree, in one of the beds that had the least amount of plants and none of the giant sunflowers…or at least we thought!

Here’s the tree on the day we planted it - April 30, 2010…

You can see, thanks to the red arrow, that there’s a tiny plant behind and off to the side of the tree. We weren’t exactly sure what it was at the time. Jack could not recall planting anything in that particular spot, so he thought that maybe a seed of some sort had somehow gotten dropped in the bed or mixed in the compost before it was laid in the bed. Whatever it was, we were going to let it grow and see. We have tried this with numerous "volunteer" plants that have sprouted in the beds. The rule is, "see what it looks like and if it has pretty blooms". If yes, we keep it. If no, toss it into the compost pile.

By mid-May most of the flowers and bushes were doing really well and had began blooming.  As the mystery plant continued to grow, we figured out that it was going to be a sunflower. By June, the sunflowers were in bloom, but they weren’t exactly giant! You’ll see a few pictures of them later at the end of this post. The only sunflower that had not bloomed was the accidental sunflower in the Mexican Plum tree bed.Here’s what it looked like on June 4…

We could tell by the leaves and stalk that this one was going to be considerably bigger then the other sunflowers and by the end of June, we knew it was going to be BIG because it was nearly the same height as the Mexican Plum tree; about eight feet tall or so.

Taken June 30, 2010.  It looks strong and healthy, but the Mexican Plum tree isn't looking so good.

I took pictures from time to time, documenting the sunflower's growth.  Here are a few...

July 13, 2010.

The bloom is starting to unfold and come alive on July 14, 2010.  Awesome! Only problem was, it was facing the wrong direction. It was facing the neighbors back yard, not ours! Sunflowers are supposed to follow the sun!!  Right?? Well, not exactly. After this giant failed to ever turn, no mater what time of day it was, I did a little research and it turns out…

"When the plant is in the bud stage, it tends to track the movement of the sun across the horizon. Once the flower opens into the radiance of yellow petals, it faces east. No one knows why. However, it is likely a defensive response. Facing south or west could result in sun-scalding of seeds during very hot days."

Quoted from the National Sunflower Association. 

I had to climb our fence to get pictures, but couldn't get a full front-on-shot.

This is what it looked like on July 15, 2010. I honestly thought this was as big as the bloom would get and I was disappointed, it was awfully small for such a huge plant! But, I was wrong; it still had some growing to do!

July 18, 2010. 
The bloom is even bigger and the plant itself was almost 12 feet tall!

While the sunflower was obviously thriving, the Mexican Plum tree was not. We couldn’t understand why, but it was beginning to look as if it were dying. We wondered if the sunflower had something to do with its condition and in an effort to save the tree (which was more important then the sunflower, no matter how much I loved it!) we decided that, just in case the sunflower was the cause, we were going to enjoy it for a few more days, and then cut it down.

This just makes me feel happy!

I was exicited everyday to walk outside and see how much the sunflower had grown.  On July 20th, I walked out side to find this…

The bloom had gotten so big and heavy that it was leaning over our back fence, facing down into our neighbors yard.

For the first time, I was actually able to see the whole flower without climbing on our fence!  I just had to walk underneath it and look up.  This is what I saw when I did...

This has got to be one happy bee! At this point, The Mexican Plum tree was looking down right sickly and so, I felt it was time for the sunflower to go.  Jack was out of town at the time and so I was left to do the dirty deed all on my own.   :(

 The sunflower stalk.  It wasn't easy cutting it down!  The root system was crazy!

When the whole plant was cut down, I cut of the top part of the stalk with the bloom, put it in a vase and placed it outside in a flower bed so that the bee's and butterflies could get to it. 

The bloom brought smiles for a few more days before it died.

Here's what the Mexican Plum tree looked like the day I cut down the sunflower...

I'd love to say that it is doing much better, but unfortunately, its not.  It actually looks much worse now then it does here.  Not sure what we are going to do from here, but if anyone can save it, it's Jack. 

So, that's the Giant Sunflower story!  I really wanted to post about it because, as I said before, it was something that made me happy, something that I spent a lot of time with, taking pictures of and smiling at.  So, I thought sharing the story and the pictures would make you smile some too. 

I also wanted to share a few recent pictures that I took of the flowers in our backyard. 

 Here's one of the giant sunflowers that didn't get so giant.

And here's another 

and another...

I have SO many pictures of sunflowers, but I'll give it a rest now.  Here are a few of the other wildflowers...

A Bordered Patch Butterfly enjoying a Gomphrena blossom. This guy may have grown up by eating some of our less successful sunflowers!

A bird feeder with permanent guest among wildflowers.

Another Bordered Patch on the "Butterfly Weed"

I want to thank you, Jack, for working so hard on beautifying our yard and providing a place for me to practice my hobby/play with my passion anytime I want. I know most of what you do, you do for me and I am so thankful (even when I complain about you spending too much time outside and not inside!) for the way in which you show your love for me!