Pandemic Garden Club
Dec. 11th, 2021 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksWelcome to the December edition of Pandemic Garden Club! Growing good things in strange times!
Anyone is welcome to comment with what they're growing right now, things they would like to try, problems they're encountering, and questions they have. Share resources, answer questions, shout encouragement.
As for myself...
It's aloe bloom season! Not to be confused with the whole rest of the summer and fall here, during which my aloes also obsessively bloomed. Now it is technically the right time for them to do it. And they are not sleeping on the job, let me tell you:
The big aloe there, aka the tentacle hedge, already bloomed once this year. A single flower stalk from a single head. Very pretty. Perfectly reasonable. If I needed any evidence that it is much, M U C H happier being in the ground now, I have it. I have it, specifically, in the form of about ten flower stalks, at least one on every major head of the plant and some with more than one. It is going bananas.
I succeeded in my November goal of repotting (almost) everything in the two cold frames for the first time in years. A lot of big pots that had been used as nurseries for assorted newly-obtained plants got broken down into smaller, variety-specific pots. This has the advantage of freeing up the few large pots I have and using up the many, many smaller pots instead.
It has the disadvantage of taking up slightly more space--an equivalent number of smaller pots with space between them not necessarily fitting into the same footprint as the larger pot they came from. So a few things got moved to the front of the house. That's okay, though, because all the stuff I put in the ground came from the front of the house, so I had room to spare. Also, we got a free-if-you'll-take-it-away metal rack that I can now use to accommodate ever more succulents! Yay!
Guys, I have so many goddamn plants???
In non-succulent news, we planted one of the three new trees we bought. This is a liquidambar, which is about as close to a maple as we're liable to keep alive in the heat up here. We had a bunch of them at our old house. I generally disliked them, because we had several right by the house and, as someone who goes barefoot often, their spiky gumballs were a huge annoyance. They're very pretty, though, and just one couldn't be that bad. What I didn't rememebr until we brought this one home was that they have a particular scent that intensely and immediately said "home" to me. So I have no regrets.
Also, all the gourds have been harvested. I've got 25 of them, mostly small-ish, round ones with a few tall teardrop ones. They're drying on the front steps. Along with the approximately eight thousand very small pumpkins we ended up with.
Anyone is welcome to comment with what they're growing right now, things they would like to try, problems they're encountering, and questions they have. Share resources, answer questions, shout encouragement.
As for myself...
It's aloe bloom season! Not to be confused with the whole rest of the summer and fall here, during which my aloes also obsessively bloomed. Now it is technically the right time for them to do it. And they are not sleeping on the job, let me tell you:
The big aloe there, aka the tentacle hedge, already bloomed once this year. A single flower stalk from a single head. Very pretty. Perfectly reasonable. If I needed any evidence that it is much, M U C H happier being in the ground now, I have it. I have it, specifically, in the form of about ten flower stalks, at least one on every major head of the plant and some with more than one. It is going bananas.
I succeeded in my November goal of repotting (almost) everything in the two cold frames for the first time in years. A lot of big pots that had been used as nurseries for assorted newly-obtained plants got broken down into smaller, variety-specific pots. This has the advantage of freeing up the few large pots I have and using up the many, many smaller pots instead.
It has the disadvantage of taking up slightly more space--an equivalent number of smaller pots with space between them not necessarily fitting into the same footprint as the larger pot they came from. So a few things got moved to the front of the house. That's okay, though, because all the stuff I put in the ground came from the front of the house, so I had room to spare. Also, we got a free-if-you'll-take-it-away metal rack that I can now use to accommodate ever more succulents! Yay!
Guys, I have so many goddamn plants???
In non-succulent news, we planted one of the three new trees we bought. This is a liquidambar, which is about as close to a maple as we're liable to keep alive in the heat up here. We had a bunch of them at our old house. I generally disliked them, because we had several right by the house and, as someone who goes barefoot often, their spiky gumballs were a huge annoyance. They're very pretty, though, and just one couldn't be that bad. What I didn't rememebr until we brought this one home was that they have a particular scent that intensely and immediately said "home" to me. So I have no regrets.
Also, all the gourds have been harvested. I've got 25 of them, mostly small-ish, round ones with a few tall teardrop ones. They're drying on the front steps. Along with the approximately eight thousand very small pumpkins we ended up with.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-12 02:08 am (UTC)In my garden news, the gladiolus refuse to go dormant so I continue to wait for them to do so. It's the right time to dig them up and divide them. They'll be going into planters as we're hoping to get the yard landscaped next year which will involve a professional doing things to keep water from puddling. (We're one of the first houses to be built on the block and several neighbors are significantly higher then we are. In the summer it's like living in a small localized swamp.)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-12 02:31 pm (UTC)Oh, gladiolus, please calm down and take a nap! It's sort of charming when plants are so overenthusiastic like that, until you need to *do* something with them. What are seasons anymore, though? :/
Oof, ouch, localized swamp sounds...less than ideal. Do you at least get to have frogs? I only get a tiny window in spring in which things are damp enough for frogs to be around.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-12 05:16 pm (UTC)