Garden Memories

7/23/12

part of my desert garden

     For the past few days a depressive mood has settled upon me in part because of the cloudy, rainy, cool weather.  On Saturday, our high temperature was 68 F, the lowest high temperature for that date ever!  But I also miss my huge flower gardens I had in the past.  When I moved to the desert, I missed my former Virginia garden.  Now that I have moved back to Virginia, I am missing my desert garden.







zinnia


     I think when gardeners invest energy and time to create and design gardens using color, height, fragrance and shape, we want to hang onto them for the delight they bring us.

vinca

     Since we are renting, I can't dig up swaths of grass and put in gardens.  Even if I could, I wouldn"t want to put in the effort and money for gardens, only to leave them behind in a few months. 











celosia


     I decided to look at the photos of my former desert garden, and it immediately brightened my mood.  All these  photos are of the beautiful flowers I grew in the desert.

pansies and petunias

 white petunias

garden angel among the petunias

Mr. Lincon roses

blue cup

gazania

     This garden will be tucked away in memory for the joy it brought me.  I"ll remember gardens past and dream of future gardens.  Do you remember and cherish gardens in your past?

Midsummer in the Garden

Zinnias

7/30/11
     It seems like it has been longer, but we are just halfway through our 120 days of over 100 degrees F (38C).  The vegetable garden with its lettuce, carrots, radishes, and spinach stopped producing two months ago.  I have a few chard plants straining to put forth a few small leaves.  I'll keep watering them in hopes they kick into normal production in the fall.  My pepper and two tomato plants never did recover from being wind burned.  They struggled but were unable to produce flowers before the real heat set in which did them in.

     The flower garden is blooming, but without a lot of plants it started out with.  As I posted before, all the cosmos died when it hit 118 F (48C).  The marigolds finally gave up this week.  And the two petunias I kept watering and watering said, "Enough" and quit flowering.  All the strawflowers died, and the weak blue cup,

zinnia flower

Marguerite daisy, blue dianthus and gazania are laboring to produce a flower or two.  They are shadows of their former bloom state and are essentially done for the summer.  The zinnias are the stars of the garden right now and are blooming profusely.   They have filled in a lot of the bare spots left from plants that died.  The celosia and vinca, two workhorse plants that bloom through the summer heat, are doing well in another part of the garden.

Celosia and Vinca

red celosia

white vinca

     Out in the yard, the oranges and grapefruits continue to slowly grow bigger.  We look forward to the fall harvest.  The lime tree produced no fruit this year, but since it lost half its leaves in the freeze last winter, it has grown new leaves on all the bare branches.  Maybe next year.  The flowering bushes (bougainvillea, yellow bells and oleander) are doing well, and going through bloom cycles as are the lantana scattered throughout the yard.  Many trees and plants don't struggle in the intense heat and sun here because of adaptations they have developed..  I'll talk about some of these adaptations in my next post.

grapefruit

lime tree this summer



lime tree after freeze







Transitioning to Summer

Diana Blueberry hybrid dianthus

5/31/11
     Our family is just back from 10 days of vacationing in our home state of Virginia.  How green it was!  How delightful it was to see rain and hear so many songbirds.  I miss all that now that we are living in the desert.  While gone, changes occurred in both my vegetable and flower gardens.

     As we move into the triple-digit heat of summer here, my vegetable garden is all but done.  The lettuces are gone, as well as the spinach, carrots and radishes.  I still have some red chard hanging on.  My one pepper plant never recovered from being wind burned.  It died while I was away.  I have 2 tomato plants left, but one is not looking good.  We've had 40 mile-per-hour winds for two days, which has damaged the plant beyond recovery, I fear.

White Wedding zinnia

     Out of the row of blue dianthus seeds I planted in the flower garden, one plant emerged and blossomed while I was away.  The white wedding zinnias bloomed while I was gone, as well as the hybrid mixed zinnias.  The pansies and petunias are almost all gone, and soon the strawflowers and gazania will die off in the daily triple-digit heat.  Next weekend I will buy the few summer flowering plants that can survive the heat and start digging them in.

Border
Beauty hybrid mixed zinnias

     As I took a walk around the yard a day after returning, I noticed that the orange tree had 7 small, green oranges on it, and the red grapefruit tree had 26 green grapefruit!  So it looks like we will have some citrus.  The lime tree had no fruit that I could find.  It sustained the most damage from the freezes this past winter, but all of its branches have new green leaves.

red grapefruit





Crickets in the Garden, Scorpions in the House

Diatomaceous earth

5/13/11
     The crickets have been chirping away in the flower garden for about six weeks now.  I don't mind the chirping.  It is a sound of summer to me.  But we live in a known scorpion area, and crickets are the favorite food of scorpions.  So the scorpions come running to my flower garden for their next meal.  And then they wander into my house.  I don't want them in either place.  We had two scorpions in the house last year, and one already this year.  I'm really fearful of them.  They frighten me. They can make themselves thinner than a credit card and slip through tiny cracks.  They can crawl into the house on plumbing pipe, or out of A/C vents.  

     The crickets had to go.  My husband dragged out the bag of diatomaceous earth and spread it in the garden to kill the crickets.  Diatomaceous earth, which looks like talcum powder, is the microscopic, fossilized remains of diatoms, a type of algae that has sharp edges that cut any crawling insect body, causing loss of body fluids and dehydration.  It is supposed to work on roaches, ants. silverfish and other crawling insects.  It is organic and non-toxic to humans and animals, but you shouldn't breathe the dust or get it into your eyes.  It is said to work on scorpions, but in reality, it doesn't work for me.  We put it down at all the doors, but that doesn't stop them from getting in the house in so many other ways that you can't cover with diatomaceous earth.  They say chickens eat scorpions.  A lot of the nearby farms have chickens.  Maybe that's why they congregate in our yard.

Dwarf (?) Zinnia

     On a more cheerful note, the cosmos, dwarf zinnia and marigold seeds I planted have all come up and are blooming.  The dwarf zinnia are only supposed to be six inches high, but mine are almost eleven inches.   The vinca I planted last summer apparently made it through the freezes and has returned. 

     I was walking through the garden section at Lowe's two weeks ago just looking, getting ideas for what to plant in my garden for summer.  Of course, I ended up walking out with a plant.  I bought a beautiful Blue Marguerite daisy which I have never grown before.  I don't know whether it will bloom all summer in our triple digit heat, but I thought I could use some more blue in the garden.  We'll see.








Boy O' Boy Marigolds

Vinca



Blue Marguerite Daisy