He promised me a rose garden…

When Jason and I got married, I told him to not send me cut flowers. More specifically, no cut roses. Give me a rosebush instead. After all, a rosebush will last for years, and cut flowers just a few days! I finally created a rose garden I like. I had a nice one when we lived in town, but not one since we have lived on the farm. I’ll give you a quick tour!

Let’s start with the least impressive picture, lol. This is the first of two new rose gardens I have. They have only been in this place for about 2-3 months, so the plants haven’t had much time to fill in.

Now for the individual plants! First, let’s start with one of my new favorites, Mutabilis. This is an old variety that gets quite large. The flowers start off almost white like this:

And then finish off dark pink like this:

And did you notice the Buckeye butterfly that was kind enough to let me take its picture? Well, here’s another. Usually, I have the hardest time getting quality butterfly photos, but I think this little guy was drying its wings.

Another lovely rose is a hybrid tea called “Electron”. This is what I call Jason’s “birthday rose”. I got everyone a rose that was either introduced or won an award the year they were born. Electron was an AARS winner the year he was born. Here it is:

Now we come to my birthday rose: Trumpeter. It is a floribunda type and was released the year I was born. It is a short little thing, but has the most magnificent neon red blooms:

Probably nine or ten years ago, I did some plant swapping with a woman through some internet group. I don’t remember her name, but she gave me this rose and told me she had gotten it from someone in Mississippi. So, I call it the Mississippi rose. It’s a prolific bloomer, and even though it has very little fragrance, I love the cute little blooms!

And that is certainly not all my roses, but those are the most decent ones for now. I also have Duchesse de Brabant, The Fairy, Tropicana, Le Marne, Don Juan, Hot Cocoa, Rainbow’s End, and many more that I can’t remember the names of right now. All of my roses have to be easy to keep. I don’t spray for anything, so they are on their own!

Thanks for stopping by!

Front Yard Do-Over (Again)

August 2008: This is the front yard the day we bought the farmhouse. To the left there is a holly tree, which we immediately removed since: A. I don’t like giant holly trees and B. It had a huge hole in the trunk and would be weak anyway. On the right was an odd little tree that resembled a ginkgo. It was not a ginkgo, but we did end up removing it for some reason or other. Normally, we don’t take down trees at all, but…

March 2009: Where the front garden all began. You can see that we fenced it in and were in the process of doing raised beds. There are lettuces, broccoli, onions, and cabbages planted here. What you may also see is that we did not remove the grass, which turned out to be a VERY BAD decision. I assure you, you will NOT WIN when battling Bermuda grass. Do yourself a favor, save your sanity and START WITH A BLANK SLATE.

May 2009: You can see that the lettuces and broccoli are done. The cabbages, as you might notice, are completely eaten up by cabbageworms. Hurrah. Not. Also note that we had a nice watering system that misted all of the beds. Also note that the grass is growing at a rapid pace.

January 2011: If you read my yearly reflections, you will know that I am always saying to live simply and not take on more than you can handle. Well, here I am, not following my own advice. Even though my front garden was crazy with grass and not well kept, I decided to plow up and landscape even MORE yard! Go me!

August 2012: Three years of battling Bermuda grass has driven us to the breaking point. It has invaded my beds and even grown into some of the wood. We have the tractor in place to remove the raised beds and we ended up burning them. It was a happy/sad day!

Here is the front space that we created back in 2011. I seeded it with a wildflower mix and a poppy mix. See the lovely grapevine on the fence? Something ate its roots not long after this photo was taken and the entire plant collapsed in two days. I still weep for that grapevine. This is early summer, 2013.

These beds were also seeded with wildflowers. You can see my onion patch here, too.

June, 2013: You can see that the grasses have been trying to grow back. Also, note the blackberry bush in the lower left corner. It honestly made the nastiest blackberries I have ever had the displeasure of eating. They had to be dead ripe to get any sugary taste, and even then, it left your mouth with a bitter taste. Gag. It was labeled as Rosborough. Nope, never again. I finally tore it out in 2016.

Shpring has shprung! This is April 2014. I love the wildflowers, but they are just hiding the fact that I don’t really want to deal with the yard at this point. Trust me, there are a ton of grasses in there that are already seeding…

April 2015, from our bedroom window. Love love love me some irises!

A favorite orange variety, given to me by an old schoolmate! I adore this iris and it is very hardy. I divided it this year (2016), so I hope for a LOT more! In the background, you can see oregano, then Lamb’s Ears, and….more irises!

Spring 2015:

Looking awfully grassy out there….No garden beds 😦

June 2016: The Brown-eyed Susans and Indian blanketflowers were absolutely insane this year. True, I had no real gardening beds (other than those right by the house), but I couldn’t tear these out…yet.

September 2016: The breaking point that has built up for eight long years! It’s time to do this dadgum yard RIGHT! One of the major issues was that it was never properly leveled, so you were always walking up or down a slope. After a few hours’ deliberation and some quick sketches, Jason and I decided to do this right so we NEVER HAVE TO RE-DO THIS AGAIN. Time for the “reno”!

First, you take a backhoe:

And you start to work on the leveling. It is really impossible to tell here, but that little scrape-out is about 3 foot tall or so! And then…

You raze that sucker and get it as flat as a pancake! Notice, almost no weeds…Praise the Lord!

We left this cornerpost because it supports a big climbing rose I have. The apple tree is actually going to be removed as sadly, it is too blighted to keep. Darn it.

And, welcome to our desert garden!

Now, for this shot, I had to get in the bucket of the backhoe and Jason lifted me up. Did I mention that I HATE heights! Whew. The asparagus bed to the far right was removed and we put it along the newly created arch next to the driveway. I call this garden the “Salad Bowl” because of its shape!

Here you can see that bowl-shape I was talking about. And here we have laid out our beds to run east to west. I can see everything from my front porch! Woohoo!

All my cute little beds…

To keep me from losing my mind, we gathered all the pine straw we could to cover up the sand. I wish you could have seen how much came in through my front door in that first week…yuck. I hate a sandy floor! And you can also see the four ornamental beds I have created in the very front of my house. We used logs from our woods to make the edging. It’s still a work in progress, but I did relocate almost all of my roses to the beds on the left, and then a lot of irises to the bed on the right. The crepe myrtle coming up in the bed was a volunteer. We have more baby crepe myrtles than anyone I’ve ever seen. We have relocated many to the chicken coop and some more to the front yard. This particular one is a nice pink color. I have no clue where it came from!

Sanity has been restored! Here we are in October 2016! It’s pretty amazing because so much has already grown up in the two weeks since I took this picture.The roses have really started filling out, and I planted tons of bulbs and some daylilies.

I hope you enjoyed the tour through time! If you take away anything, just remember that Bermuda grass is the devil and you’d better rip all that hot mess out before you get to planting! And yes, it goes deep underground. Had we done that to begin with, I’d have a really lovely eight year old garden now. Oh well! Live and learn!!!

Until next time!

I’ll take one. No, better make that 200.

“Cure for an obsession: Get another one.” ~Mason Cooley

I have a weirdness. It popped up in a conversation between Jason and I the other day. For a bit of a backstory, it began innocently enough, as it always does.

I was in the plant section, more specifically, the CLEARANCE (clear-ron-say, as I love to pronounce it) section of Lowe’s. Three sad and mostly dead African violets caught my eye. They were a whopping dollar each. And now let’s hit the backstory to my backstory: Ten years ago, I got an African violet. I don’t remember where I got it. It started innocently enough. A single plant, right? Then, as I started researched African violets, they have things called “suckers” which are little baby plants trying to come up from the base of the mother plant. This is not a good thing for your normal violet, because they will stop blooming. So, being the good plant stewardess that I was, I painstakingly removed each tiny embryonic baby from the mama with tweezers and a Xacto knife (sterilized, of course) and put them with gentle, loving care in a Jiffy greenhouse. You know, the giant ones with like 40 cells.

Then I discovered that there are things called “trailing” African violets, which, LONG AND VERY BORING STORY SHORT, suckers are NOT a bad thing and that’s just the ways trailers grow. Well, crud. So now I had approximately 41 trailing African violets. I will spare you the horror of the boring details, but I ended up doing hours and hours of research on how to BEST raise African violets, what they needed, what they hated, the Latin name, and heck, I may have joined the African Violet Society of America. I even gave a presentation (seriously) to our local garden club on African violet care.

Because you see, when I get fixated on something, I get FIXATED. I have to know all about it. I want you to ask me questions, because I am READY and PREPARED with an endless array of information and documentation and if I had been on Jeopardy and African violets were a subject, I would have stomped a mudhole in everyone else’s behind. Back to present-day Lowe’s:

I thought about my violet that I had ten years ago. I still miss “her”. (Yes, it was a ‘her’, and she had a name, though I can’t remember it) Here she was in her full glory. Be still my heart:

And the worst part was that I have no idea what happened to her. I am sure that, in the course of us moving and my subsequent obsessions, she suffered a terrible, neglectful death. But anyway, I got the violets at Lowe’s. I have babied them (one did die), pampered them, fertilized them, and given them the quarter-turn each and every day in their sunny, south-facing window. They have rewarded my patience and persistence by thriving and blooming:

But enter my weirdness. I don’t want just two African violets anymore. I want a hundred. I want a greenhouse full of African violets. I want so many that people can’t come into my house without falling over some Saintpaulia (if you don’t get it, don’t feel bad…it’s the nerd in me). I want so many that people will call me “that crazy violet lady”.

So naturally, a few weeks later I was in Lowe’s again and there was a FULL FLAT of sad, neglected AVs. Be still my heart. But they weren’t yet marked down and I’ll be danged if I pay more than a dollar each for a flowerless AV from Lowe’s when I know that’s what they mark them down to. Enter my DLS (dear long-suffering) husband. A week later, he has to go to Lowe’s. I beg him to go check on the flat. When he returns, it’s like Christmas. He scores fifteen violets…for a dollar a piece. I am giddy. It was better than getting a pony.

So later that night, he says, “Why is it that you can’t just have ONE of something?”

Me: I don’t know what you mean.

He (looking at me like I have lost it): You can’t just have one. Why do you have to get multiples of everything?

Me (puzzled look): I don’t know what you’re talking about.

He: We have six dogs, more chickens than anyone we know, like 10 parrots….(voice trails off)

Me: shrugs

Of COURSE I know what he means! It’s the same reason I couldn’t have a pair of zebra finches. I had to have 15. I couldn’t have one gerbil; I had to have every color so that I could, quite literally, be able to recreate ANY AND ALL possible color variations in the gerbil breeding world. I couldn’t have just one orchid; I had to save them all from Lowe’s and my kitchen window looked like a Brazilian rainforest minus the monkeys. I couldn’t just have “three or four” chickens, but instead I needed one (okay…more) of each breed known to mankind. One roll of washi tape? NO! I must have one representing each holiday, each possible vacation destination, and every color in the full Pantone color library.

But I have good news! I am older and I am tireder. Yes, tireder. And I am tired of having multiples of anything! Minimalism and my obsession to have a full set of 200 gel pens to go with my new coloring book do not mesh. So, I have been clearing out my past obsessions, and not putting anything else in their place.

Except African violets. Which I can justify because they do not poop nor do they shed. Those are some of my new requirements to come into my house.

Also, if you know where I could get a plant like my original AV, you are my new friend…I really do miss it and I will always make enough window space for one more!

Cheers!

Texas: Hotter’n a pot of collards

It’s no secret that in Texas, if you want the weather to change, just wait two minutes. Honestly, it’s a real mixed bag around here. You can walk out in shorts and a tank top that morning, and come back a few hours later in need of a pair of woolen underwear, four layers of clothing, and a full-body zip-up sleeping bag with arm and legholes. But that’s just fall.

In the summer, it is hot. Like…deathly hot. Like…walk into a steaming hot blanket kind of hot. You will hear us say all of the time, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” Well, I am here to tell you that it’s both, and it’s horrible. And hint, hint, it gets worse the older you get. I have learned that I need to be inside from about 10:30am until just before sunset. If I can’t do that (and let’s face it, I can’t), then when I AM outside, I’m hugging the treeline to stay in the shadows. It is on days like today that I dream of moving to Colorado, Oregon, Alaska, Maine….pretty much anywhere where my shoes aren’t melting on the pavement and where snow is not a rarity.

Fortunately, there are only a few months that are pretty gross, and our winters are mild. Starting mid-July through September, however, I am ready to live in an igloo and hunt caribou. Or whatever igloo-dwelling people do. I don’t care. I no longer wonder why people take mid-day naps around here and siestas in Mexico. It’s because it is too hot to even manage a decent conversation without wanting to kill or seriously hurt someone. You want to see mayhem? Go check out a line of people waiting for ANYTHING in Texas come July. It ain’t pretty.

BUT, at least earlier this year, we got rain. A ton of rain. Enough to scare you kind of rain. And with a lot of rain, you get a lot of wildflowers. And this year, the crepe myrtle were so beautiful, they literally brought tears to my eyes…I swear I saw a double rainbow and white doves and the American flag in the background as I was taking photos. Really.

So please feel free to live vicariously through my happy photos during the month of May and June. Sadly, everything in my front yard now looks like it has been hit with a blowtorch.

Spring Roses

Some of my favorites: Le Marne and Belinda’s Dream. It’s a beautiful year for roses!

Today’s wisteria

This is year #5 of allowing what was once a tiny stub of wisteria to grow. This has been its most productive year to date. I keep it trimmed, otherwise, it would take over the arbor, and probably my entire house! Happy spring to you all!

New Year’s Revolution

Happy 2013!

With the new year, I have decided a few things.

1. Less meat, more veggies in our diet.

2. Cook at home and stop dining out so much.

3. No more Facebook.

4. Plant a bigger garden

So far, I’ve been doing all four, which is pretty amazing for me. Of course, we’re only 9 days into the year.

To help me along, I bought some cookbooks for inspiration, because most of my cookbooks are the typical, everyday Southern American diet which consists of 5 major food groups:

1. Bacon

2. Cheese

3. Cream cheese

4. Butter

5. Cream-of-whatever soup

Last week, my new cookbooks arrived. First up is, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. I haven’t made very many recipes out of it yet, but it is like a ‘Joy of Cooking’ for vegetarians. I did made some aioli (garlic mayonnaise) and served it with an avocado club sandwich and it was PHENOMENAL. I could have downed about 4 of them. I actually got to use my mortar and pestle that has been slowly developing a nice dust layer on my shelf. I had to look up a video on how to use the thing as I was completely clueless. Luckily, all the garlic DID remain in the little bowl without flying out everywhere.

Next up is Weelicious by Catherine McCord. This cookbook is geared toward families with young children. We have been using this cookbook several times a day already. While I think some of the recipes do need slight tweaking, so far, the majority of them have been hits with the kids. Last night I made the Graham Crackers, and we totally scarfed ’em. Fortunately, they made a huge batch when you roll them out to 1/8″ (and NOT the 1/4″ recommended), so there are plenty left. I like Weelicious because it is mostly low sugar recipes or uses alternative sweeteners like agave nectar and honey. You can get many of the recipes for free right on her website, too. I made the Beet and White Bean hummus a few days back. I have never eaten a beet in my life and I have to say I was very surprised. I figured it would taste like dirt (that’s my own weird thought on beets), but fresh beets are very sweet and have a consistency of a carrot. Not to mention that they are my absolute favorite color: fuschia. Be forewarned, though, because they will turn everything fuschia that they touch. Anyway, it makes this radical hot pink hummus. When Jason came home, I whipped out this neon dip with some baby carrots, celery sticks, and bell pepper sticks, and he looked at it like it had a dead rat in the center of the bowl. Especially after I told him it contained beets.

Poor Jason. His Granny made him eat canned beets as he grew up and she was a Clean Plate enforcer. So, Jason HATED beets. Or so he thought until he tried my dip! Actually, it just tastes like a good bean dip and nothing more.

In addition to adding more veggies to our diet, I also bought some different grains and rice varieties. I made a wild rice soup that was just out of this world. When I served it at dinner, my youngest daughter ran upstairs, grabbed her diary, and made an entry, as you can see above. She then brought it back down to be sure that I saw it. In addition to “I hate soop, Mom” you can clearly see the arrow breaking her little heart and ripping it in two. Because that’s exactly what I was trying to do by making a good, healthy meal, you see. As I was slaving in the kitchen for a few hours to prepare this soup, I was thinking to myself, “Now what could I prepare to make my child absolutely want to vomit?” Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, neither child would come within 10 feet of the soup so Jason and I got to eat it all. Oh well. We can’t win ’em all.

Anyway, I can’t say that I miss Facebook. I have broken up with Facebook and moved on to Pinterest, which I find much more inspirational and I also do not check it constantly like I did with FB. Although some pins are just nauseating (gold staples, anyone?), you can at least search what you like and the comments aren’t irritating.

As far as the garden goes, we planted our onions about 4 days ago. I’m glad we did, because this week has brought flooding rains that will be great for getting them established, providing that a river doesn’t decided to run through the front yard and carry my baby onions to the bottom of the hill. I tried a few new varieties this year, including Texas Legend, Super Star, and Red Candy Apple. We also planted our old favorite, 1015s. Plus THIS YEAR I planted the things in good, deep compost which I did not do last year, and ended up with the saddest, sorriest lot of onions I ever planted. Now is the time to start some cole crops, and I’m also getting my taters ready to plant by letting them develop some nice eyes before planting them. I am also going to try some new things in the garden including bok choy, turnips, and winter squashes.

My Sanity Garden

Now here is a garden I like. This is my herb and rose garden off the back deck. Although there is some Bermuda trying to invade, it is a fine bladed variety, and not the coastal Bermuda that I have nightmares about.

This garden has the following roses: Belinda’s Dream, The Fairy, John F.Kennedy, Duchess du Brabant, and 2 unknown varieties. Why 4 of them are pink varieties, I do not know. I guess subconsciously I love pink?

It has these herbs/veggies: sage, dill, fennel, rosemary, lemon balm, real tarragon, pineapple sage, catnip, hore hound, and chives.

Lastly, the ornamentals: Black and blue salvia, Persian shield, wisteria, violets, milkweed, sweet William, and 4 o’clocks.

It’s my happy (grass free) place.

Grass: 1, Me: 0

Okay, I give up. I’m crying ‘Uncle’. I’m tossing in my chips and hanging up my hat. The Bermuda grass has won. It has seeped into, and infected, my entire front yard. There is no denying it is the dominant vegetative growth out there. Forget the vegetables and my poor little flowers. The Bermuda has ruined all of my beds and has choked out many of my plantings.

A couple of weeks ago, Jason was lamenting about the grass. That’s a really nice way of putting it. What really happened is that he was having to weedeat the front yard YET AGAIN and lost it. Or maybe I should say he tossed it, because he threw the weedeater, and I do mean he slung it while screaming obscenities, across the yard. I can only hope that the muffler burned a few blades of Bermuda grass in retaliation. It was all about the grass.

Ten minutes later, he came back to the front yard. I was (YET AGAIN) weeding and wisely had kept my head down and mouth shut during his grass tirade.

J: (loudly) Don’t you think this front yard looks like CRAP? I mean, REALLY LOOKS LIKE CRAP?

Me: Yep. (still weeding)

J: I have been weedeating for 25 years and I’m not doing it ANYMORE! NOT ANYMORE! (How I would love to see a photo of him with a weedeater held high above his head with a caption that read: AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, I WILL NEVER WEEDEAT AGAIN”)

Me: Okay, well, you’re a fix-it type person, so figure out what we need to do.

Jason sits down and thinks for a bit.

J: I think we should scrap the whole yard. Fence, beds,brick path, landscape timbers, gates…everything.

I sigh.

Me: I think you’re right.

It’s a very hard thing to look at all of the work you put into something and realize you have to scrap it. I think about all of the hours of planting, laying the brick path, making the beds, putting up the fence…and weeding. Endless hours of ripping up grass. I’ll be starting over at Square One, yet again, four years after moving in. Still, there is also a part of me that is very excited. True, everything we did will pretty much be going down the toilet, but we get to start fresh. With no grass this time.

So, we’ll be tearing out the beds, fence, paths, timbers, arbor, and then using a box blade on the tractor to take it all back to sand. My front yard is going to look like a sand pit for about 6 months. I am giving us a 6 month break from our yard. Well, kind of. I’ll still have to yank out the errant weeds, but at least there will be no need for weedeating, anyway. I’m not sure Jason could handle that anymore.

We will stockpile the compost in the raised beds and I’ll have the fun and exciting job of picking out every sprig of Bermuda I can find. FUN TIMES. Then, instead of raised beds, we are going to do direct planting from here on out. The Bermuda just uses the frames as a hiding spot, and I can’t get it all out. So no more raised beds for us.

Wish us luck. We’re gonna need it. But at least there won’t be any more flying weedwhackers on our farm.

Fighting the System…AKA To Kill A Mockingbird

I’ve told you previously that there is a pest for any fruit/veggie that you wish to grow. They’re relentlessly trying to eat the plant before you do. For a gardener, it’s just a case of winning the battle, but never the war.

Last night, I thought it would be a good time to check for tomato hornworms. If you’ve never heard of them, they grow to an enormously freaky size and can eat half of your tomato plant in about as much time as it would take you to slurp a spaghetti noodle. I ended up finding 4, which was surprising, since I hadn’t seen ANY earlier that day, but that’s kind of the hornworm’s M.O.: You won’t notice anything amiss one minute, and the next, half of your plant is eaten. Using my own “CSI: Tomato” methods, I deduced that the eaten parts of the plant had been done extremely recently and located fresh worm ‘frass’ (aka: POOP). Sure enough, there was a nice, 4.5″ worm clinging to my plant. Actually, 3 of them (one was small). Grrr….The sentence handed down was ‘Death by Chicken’.

So today, I was looking out into the garden and a family of mockingbirds decided to build another nest in my blackberry bush. One of the babies from the first nest was picking my berries off, one by one. Mind you, I haven’t even had ONE berry myself this year! I screamed, “Hey, (insert synonym for male donkey)!”, and ran at the bird with a stick in my hand. He fluttered off, looking at me with disgust and a sly look that said, “I’ll be back as soon as the front door closes”. Which I’m sure that he was. So, I got out in the 90+ degree heat and started attempting to put a net over what was left of the berries. Not a good idea to try by yourself. I ended up popping off about 5 nice looking berries when the netting stuck to them, then the netting got stuck to every thorn on the berry vine, not to mention every stick, rock and piece of grass in the way. Sweating profusely and tired of fighting the stupid net, I went back inside. I’m sure that the mockingbird was back before I had stepped 2 feet into the house. Sometimes you have to admit a certain level of defeat. However, they don’t know about my next move, which is plastic snakes. I put a fake snake in my plum tree to ward off the birds. SO FAR, it is working. Hell, I almost peed myself one night when I was walking by the tree, looked up, and thought I was eye to eye with a snake. And I’m not even remotely afraid of snakes! So, I hope the birds feel the same way. I just hope that they can’t read the “Made In China” stamp on the snake. Then the cat’s way out of the bag.