How to Care for An Outdoor Orchid

I tied up an orchid to an old piece of driftwood today. I also stuck two air plants from the yard on the driftwood. Then, I hung the wood from a screw on the front porch.


I think the only challenge will be to keep it misted with water. It won't receive direct sunlight, and the roots can flow anywhere.

DIY Upside Down Tomato Planter

Here's an affordable way to have an upside down tomato planter that doubles as a regular hanging planter.

I cut a strawberry-sized hole in the bottom of this hanging planter. Then I stuck a tomato plant seedling in the hole. It will always turn up to grow toward the sun. Here's the posting from a few years ago that shows the hole.

How to propagate a lily

I got this little lily with the bulb still attached. Some people would throw away the bulb and put the flower in a vase to enjoy for a few days. Instead of cutting off the stem, I decided to pull up the stalk, bulb and all, and plunk the whole thing into the vase. I didn't know how it would work.

After the bloom died, I planted the bulb, which already had new growth emerging from the top of the bulb.

Now that it's in the ground, I think I will cut off the stalk so that the new foliage on the top of the bulb is forced to grow. It should also stimulate the roots to grow, which will make the plant stronger.

By the way, how about those new garden gloves?! I ordered them at the same time as my gardening shoes from gardenshoesonline.com. I still can't say enough good things about that place.

Amaryllis is blooming

The amaryllis blooms each year at this time. It's been in bloom now for a week. It's so beautiful!

I wasn't even trying to grow this plant

I had some rodents knock over a cilantro seedling in my incubator area of the garden. I was too lazy to move it, so it's been growing where it fell. In front of the cilantro seedling is a little royal poinciana seedling that just popped up. I wasn't even trying to grow it.

What's so cool with the (above) RP seedling is that I planted these seeds 10 months ago. Only a few seeds germinated and I have baby RP trees (shown below).

So, the little seed this seedling sprouted from was planted 10 months ago and it has just now decided to germinate. Pretty cool.

New Shoes and a Peach Problem

The good news for the day is that I got an awesome pair of Garden Grips. They are from GardenShoesOnline, and they are the most comfortable pair of garden shoes I've ever had. Normal crocs have holes so my feet get wet. But these are awesome and have all kinds of support inside. The big plus is that they're not 6 inches wide like most crocs. Plus, if I wanted to, I could wear them to the gator games because I was able to get orange.

Next on my list is the problematic peach tree. Yesterday I had to cut out a rubber tree stake that I left on the trunk for too long. It grew right into the tree trunk. Stupid mistake.




Today, I took a better look at that one lonely peach and noticed some kind of brown gummy goo on the peach itself. I spent a few hours today on the internet and still I don't know if I've got borers or something else. At any rate, I yanked off the golf ball size fruit and then doused the tree with Bears fruit tree powder. Argh. Worst case scenario, all the leaves fall off...it's not like I'd be killing all the fruit.

Duranta Gold Mound

Duranta Gold Mound is very popular around south Florida right now. It's popularity exploded a few years ago. Nearly all of our street medians have Mamey Croton, Gold Mound, and Society Garlic. The combination of red, lime green, and purple is unbeatable. If the society garlic (crinum) wasn't so stinky, I would have it all over my yard.

Here (above) is my tiny rose bed, I have a large patchoulli in the back, two roses on the right, an asparagus ferm in the middle and a row of gold mound in the front. There's a trick to growing pretty gold mound...

Trick...only the new growth is this fluourescent lime green. So, you need to keep it trimmed not only to maintain size, but also to maintain that showy bright color. If you were to let the plant go for a year, it would still be pretty, but also a tyipical medium dark green color. The whole reason (in my opinion) to use duranta is so that you can achive that big contrast in color and texture. That's why it's so striking when used in combination with a red or dark green plant.


So, this brings me to the second point of this posting... I blogged about Duranta Gold Mound last year. Last week, I was looking on eBay for some duranta seeds and found a seller using my picture from last year (seen below). You can see my car mirror and the link to my original posting.

From danielle's garden blog

So, clearly I need to be better about watermarking my images. But, the image is hosted on an "all rights reserved" site and was published on my blog which clearly states my copyright notice. Further, all images unless otherwise stated are always copyrighted by the creator...it's a law. But, when it comes to prosecution, the law is still pretty hard to use.

My pineapple is blooming!

Here's something I did not know. A pineapple will bloom on it way to maturity. The fruit itself will send out little purple flowers which then become the dreaded seeds that you can never cut out all the way. This small pineapple is about 3-4 inches and the plant extends out from the center about 2.5-3 ft on all sides. The ends of the spikey leaves are damaged because the dog plays with them and the lawnmower clips them.

This is the fist pineapple I've had set fruit, so I'm still new at it. This one has been in the ground for about 2 years I think. It was the top from a grocery store pineapple.

The Front Planters are Blooming

A few weeks ago I planted two petunias in the front left planter. The aloe is from the large plant in the backyard. It puts out pups each year. The morning glory vines are from the seeds that dropped from December's blooms.


The bougainvillea that I cut down to 48 inches has grown 2 feet in the past month.