Nature and Gardening

Did you spend some time in nature over this past weekend? What did you do? Did you find anything interesting? Experience anything new?

Late last summer I saw this tiny weed in amongst some nettles and dandelions. It wasn't faring too well but it had a few beautiful, floppy white flowers so I took a photo and looked up what it was. Turns out it was a solitary Common Mallow that had somehow found its way to us. I certainly hadn't seen any around our place before so I decided to get the rest of the weeds out and nurse it through the winter.

One winter and one exuberant puppy later it had made it to the Summer. It is now just under a metre tall and has a huge number of flowers thar are just starting to bud. I'm going to let it go to seed and see if I can get it growing round the back, which is just loose stones on an unmarked farm road.

So digging up lawn is a nightmare, particularly if that lawn is kikuyu which is very common in my country. Every patch you clear will rapidly become colonised again without constant vigilience.

In an ideal world you'd rent something like a turf cutter, clear everything, and landscape from there. Unfortunately that's prohibitively expensive a lot of the time. Not to mention not always an option if you're not physically able to optimise the rental time with continuous work.

Solarising is popularly mentioned, but for a quarter acre of lawn that would take a loooot of laid down stuff. Doing it patch by patch tends to lead to recolonisation by the grass.

Does anyone know of better solutions for someone who can chip away for a couple of hours a week at most reliably? Where it wont end up in using all that time policing the edges of whatever you've cleared with spades and tears.

I'm looking for the farmer's almanac, anecdotal type of information more than anything scientific or generalized.

Specifically, I'm curious about typical behavior in Southern California coastal regions, and really, the micro climate within a few miles of the Pacific around the Los Angeles Basin, but I think that is a bit too specific of a question for a small community here.

I am developing an increased allergic reaction to stings. I have probably gotten around 2-3 dozen stings while riding a bike for the last 2 decades. I have mostly limited myself to riding in the last hour or two of daylight which seems to avoid bees. I'm curious if there are patterns of predictable/probabilistic inactivity other than the day/night cycle.

Turns out my passion flower plant is gonna give me fruit this year 🙂🙃🙂🙃

I've been looking around for some ideas for a birdhouse with a camera inside to look for nesting visitors. Does anyone have anything to suggest for a good setup there?

Poblanos are probably my favorite peppers to grow. Very mild heat, but tons of flavor, and fantastic for rellenos or enchiladas.

[Image description: close up of a large green poblano pepper on the plant]

Today I thought it would be beneficial to share info on these annoying little pests. You can see in the photo here some little bugs hanging out on a pepper plant flower. This photo was taken back in October when I was growing peppers from seed indoors. I've sadly thrown this plant out since the aphids kept coming back six times over and I got real sick of trying to get rid of them; but I took some shortcuts which is why that never worked. Learn from my laziness.

If you have aphids that have been living on a plant, you'll probably notice their white exoskeletons first. They shed them just as a gecko would shed it's skin. The bugs themselves are little pear shaped green dots. They like to target new growth especially, so that's where you'll notice them first. They do love to live underneath leaves too so when searching for them, checking under the leaves is always a best bet.

These guys like to eat the plant sap and sometimes leave behind a sweet sticky residue cslled honeydew. This can in turn attract other insects such as ants that like that sweet flavor. They cause a lot of damage like stunted growth and they will quickly make a healthy plant start yellowing and dropping its leaves. Luckily they are one of the easier pests to get rid of. I've found that blasting them off with a strong stream of water works best. I try not to use pesticides or neem or anything like that for these guys because the water is the easiest solution, and due to the fact they love to target human edible plants, it ends up ruining our pepper plants! I don't think it would be much of an issue if you used those methods on foliage plants however.

So, a strong spray of water helps. But what else? Diatomaceous earth is one such solution. This is white flour looking stuff that you can spread on the top soil. I would not recommend if this is a plant reachable by animals or kids though since it is a poisonous option. So what about soapy water? Yes, this helps too. And best of all it doesn't including introducing chemicals to the soil. An important tip too, is to refresh the soil once you treat the plant. This is what ultimately led to my pepper plants getting decimated time and time again; I never repotted them and they kept coming back. That, and being in such close conjunction with other plants around it. So with that said; isolate any plant that has pests on it. They'll just keep coming back!

If you're not opposed to introducing beneficial insects, lacewings and ladybugs love these little jerks. Though always be mindful of introducing non native species to your gardens.

Hopefully you never have to deal with an aphid infestation like I did, but know that if you do, there are much harder pests to get rid of... dont even get me started on spider mites... :')

This plant is at my work, no clue what kind it is, but it used to be so pretty and vibrant but now it's brittle and dying.

What is i5 called and what are the beat conditions for it?

I've been getting into orchids lately and reading a lot about them. I have a few, but thought it would be fun to get some more to learn about how to care for them best.

I posted on my local buy nothing group (a neighborhood facebook group where people give away stuff they don't want anymore). I asked if anyone would give me an old orchid that wasn't flowering and said I'd return it if I could get it to bloom again. Well, I had to cut the post off after 18 hours because so many people responded!

The picture shows the first 7 plants I received, but not the 4 I already owned or the 3 more I picked up the next day! I assigned each one a number so I can keep track of whose is whose.

Most were in pretty good shape, just dusty and a few dehydrated. I looked them all over and gave them a wipe down and a watering if they needed it and assessed their needs. One needed to be repotted right away, I think it had been kept too wet and it had a lot of rotten roots. I'll repot a few of the others in the next few days. Otherwise they're off and growing around my house! I'm excited to see how it turns out.

But there's something about the roots of these new cuttings that gives me trypophobia-esque heebie jeebies.

[Image description: a hand holding a segment of a tomato stem. The lower part of the stem has straight white roots sticking out from one side.]

This is more along the lines of foraging rather than gardening, but there are wild black raspberry bushes that grow behind my house and I try to get to them before the birds do. Today's harvest is my biggest in the 4 years I've lived in this house

He's in a similar climate as my 9b inland southern California garden and posts useful tips, stories and cultivar histories every Friday.

If he'd smashed a statue or thrown paint in an art gallery, get have got a tougher sentence.

via Flickr

I planted: -salad -tomatos -cucumber -zuchini -sunflower -snow pea -bell pepper -ground cherry -potatos

😊

I opened my compost bin today to find hundreds of these guys crawling around in the compost. I'm curious as to what they are.

Pic by me

Our most productive plant is K. laetivirens, an unusual succulent that yields many plantlets around the edges of its leaves. There are varieties: ours is bright green, resilient, and likes small pots.

We grew a large one (to truly become a mother of thousands). We cultivate its many plantlets in glass pots and anonymously leave them for others in our neighbourhood in Toronto.

More photos of adopted plantlets, etc.

I have two water lilies putting out a flower every few days.

Got a batch of caterpillars this year. Did not get any the year before and in 2021 the ate every leaf in the vine.

Been hesitant to get into gardening for a while, finally took the plunge in late May with whatever I could scrape together. Already learning from mistakes (vertical support, crowding, a grow bag that isn't meant for potatoes 😊), but happy that it's still alive so far! No peas yet but I'm patiently hoping. Open to advice and tips for this/next year!

[Image description: split image, left image is 12 sprouting snap peas after 2 weeks planted in a 13 inch wide black canvas grow bag, right image is the same snap peas at 5 weeks having grown to around 2 feet tall]

I've generally never had much luck with succulents because they used to get leggy and etiolated previously. Then I stumbled upon this guy - and the good thing about him is, there's no stem! So they grow these little rosettes without too much effort :)

Now that I have them under strong lighting, we are seeing much better growths. Haworthias are great little low growing succulents that get really fleshy leaves and almost to me look a little bit like alien mushrooms or something.

I've had this little one for two years now and have not repotted it yet. (Probably about time as we can see it's leaves are starting to grow past the pot.) As with all succulents, they will require a succulent mix or gritty soil mix. Sometimes I like to add a little extra pumice to my succulent mixtures -- I find that haworthias are a little less picky though, and can go with just bagged mix honestly. Also, likewise, their water needs are very low. With any succulent I live by the "soak and dry" rule - with until the soil is completely dry, then soak that ho.

We see here on mine there is a ton of new growth going on. When I got him at a box store, he was in turmoil. The soil was soaked, there were almost no leaves, and there was a bit of root rot. :( luckily as you can see it has bounced back quite lively. The soil/watering habits really make a difference! Keeping it in a drier location is best. However, its worth noting that this little guy does live in my sunroom where it is always over 60% humidity, so the water habits really come into play here.

So aside from the obvious succulent care, I really like haworthias because they spread so easily. They will easily overrake a pot with their pups. This makes such a full and lively appearance. Imagine a full pot full of moss but they feel like little bouncy balls. However, as they are very slow growers, it may take some time for that to happen.

Mine is only about 3/4" high, so a little guy. But they can reach up to only a couple inches from the soil making them a perfect little compact alien plant. They also propogate very easily from those pups or even leaves, just as any succulent would.

That's all I have for this little guy today. If you find that I have inaccurate information or have more to add, I'm always looking for more knowledge!