Friday, July 06, 2007

Gardening ( just an update)

Well, since I botherd to make the post about my gardening exploits earlier in the year, I thought I'd take a moment to update the photos with current ones.

This is the original post: Click Here

This my current garden (jungle) below:

Considering it started in a bucket garden, living in the shade, I had no idea the cucumber plants would take off the way they have. My cucumber vine is now a little over 20 feet long and still climbing.  My zuchinni were doing GREAT until they got so heavy that they fell over the edge of the bucket... the fibrous stems are so fragile that they snapped in half and I lost most of the plant. I DO have about ten cucumbers growing at the moment though, so I'll enjoy those instead.

This is my pothos. Everyone grows these, but I'm sentimentally atached to my two remaining ones. I've had these same ones for over nine years now and they've been with me through one engagement, three girlfriends, four apartments, three career changes, and nine or ten birthdays. They've seen some stuff over the years. I had to cut them back and get them back outside this year to get some new rigid growth. They don't do quite as well indoors for me, but they'll survive in there over the winter.

This is my three year old Passion Flower. Raising passion fruit isn't that awful hard except that this plant isn't supposed to survive more than one season, much less three. This is it's second blooming year and it's going crazy on my deck. It's got two vines over 20 feet long each that have grown across the wall, up the wall, across the clothesline, and are now reaching for more places to stretch. This is one of my favorites.

Just another shot of the cucumber and squash plants.

This is the japanese indoor fern that was a mere seedling so many months ago. It took me quite awhile go get it out of root shock, but now it's doing great. It's over five times the size it was when I got it two months ago.

My Zynnia, the only one that didn't get dropped on it's head about three times. I started with five, but for some reason the tiny pots I planted them in seemed to be the only ones I ever knocked over... so I'm down to one, but it's a healthy one, so I'm happy.  This is one of the ones I grew from seens in March.

These were all seeds too when I started. Two marigolds and a Lantana. The marigolds are a little over 18 inches tall now and blooming regularly. Not the best smelling flower, but it's pretty. I'm more interested in seeing what the Lanana does as the season goes on.

I got these peppers free for buying so many plants from the online nursery, so I decided to give them a shot and see if they'd grow. As you might can see, I have one pepper blooming at the moment. Wish me luck with the rest.

This is just a neat plant. It's a heliotrope, which is latin for "follows the sun." Indeed each night, it leans back eastward, turning all its leaves to face the sun for the next morning. As the day progresses, it turns its leaves to keep them pointed toward the sun. So, each day when I come home, it's pointed at me (west). When I get up in the morning to look again, it's got it's backside pointed to me cause it's pointing east waiting on the sun. A neat little thing.

My tomato PLANTS are doing great. One of them is seven feet tall and I had to snip the top of it to prevent any more growth. The actual production of tomatoes however is another story. Not one tomato bloom yet.... any suggestions?

Last but not least, my poor spider plant. This thing was all but dead when I returned from Africa in february. Again, another plant that is not designed to live through the winter outdoors. However, a couple hours of breaking the root ball apart and separating it into four separate plants and now I have four healthy spider plants, blooming out of the same pot, along with a agave cactus sapling that I saved when I hacked my big cactus to death.

 

Well, that's it for me on the gardening front. I stlil haven't gotten the emails back I'm waiting for from people, so I'll try to post the 4th of July photos while I'm in the mood.

 

2 comments:

  1. Having cucumbers indoors, did you have to self pollenate them to produce?

    ReplyDelete
  2. They're actually on a covered patio so they do get some outside assistance from mother nature, but I used a cotton swab to cross pollenate just in case. Thanks for the comment!

    ReplyDelete

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