My Half Acre of Paradise

Park Seed has a good-looking variety of festuca glauca: Park Seed: Blue Fescue - A perennial Blue Fescue with 12-inch silvery foliage.

High Country Gardens is a great source for info and photos of ornamental grasses that grow well in the west. I might find a variety on this site and then look for seeds somewhere else, since HCG is expensive.
Drought Tolerant Plants, Perennials, and Xeriscaping for Western Gardens

I bought some seed starting supplies at Wal-Mart tonight: a 72-cell “Jiffy” system that has the peat disks that you water and then they expand so you can plant seeds in them. We’ll see how it works. Also got 50 of the little miniature peat pots that I need to fill with potting soil and plant stuff in. These are the ones you can plant whole in the ground, without taking the plant out of the pot.

I’m thinking I should get some seeds for decorative bunch grasses that I can plant up in the Aspen tree area. I’ll browse Thompson & Morgan and Granite seed to see what I can find. Granite is a local company, and they have some killer stuff!

I’m trying again to see if I have the image uploading plugin working. The previous post was using the WP 2 new feature that uploads files. I kind of like the sticky images plugin, because it resizes the original image to my specs.

Well, I upgraded the blog today to WP 2.0, and it seems to be working fine. I’m going to test whether the plugin that allows me to upload a photo is working well. Here we go:

This is a photo from last year in April, when wind was bending the tulips at Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

The Thompson & Morgan seed catalog arrived this month. It’s an awesome catalog, and it has so much information on each plant that you can use as a quick reference for many plants in your garden. I have ordered from them, and the seed is always great quality. They have some interesting varieties you often won’t see growing in the local nurseries. Some of the things I’ve gotten from them are:

• Catananche caerulea
• Nepeta transcaucasica
• Salvia transylvanica
• Salvia viscosa
• Malva sylvestris

I like Thompson & Morgan quite a bit! And from the looks of those plants I listed above, I seem to like tall purple flowers quite a bit, too!

Larry Sagers has a new column in the Deseret Morning News on new plants:
deseretnews.com | Exciting new plants for your garden. The “Coral Rose” Diascia looks pretty cool.

Well, we finally got some snow again this week. Had a good six inches or so to shovel off the driveway on Thursday morning. But what was even more impressive was a few days before that — the snow wasn’t terribly deep, but it got really icy. Our backyard neighbor, Wade, had driven up our driveway and came to the door to drop something off. While he was talking at the door with Dana, his parked truck slid down our driveway! Fortunately, it stopped sliding at the street and didn’t go all the way down the hill! Wade didn’t seem too worried, though.

Today was so warm, I was out pulling weeds in my yard! Well, the ground is still mostly frozen, but I was able to pull out a lot of old, dead weeds from last summer. It was refreshing to be out in the garden again. I remember two winters ago, we had a warm January. It got up to 60-some degrees late that month. Very unusual.

Everyone says Utah used to have more snow in the valleys years ago. We all wonder if global warming is occurring, or if we just have faulty memories. I think I’ll look up the data online and see if I can find historical snow accumulations over the years. If so, I’ll post it here.

This is another shot of my favorite part of the backyard, this one in the fall. Click to see a larger image.