My Half Acre of Paradise

With my new zoom lens, I can capture some very close images up on the mountains from my backyard. The fall colors are really peaking right now. I’m actually surprised how close I can get with this lens, because those mountain tops are pretty far up there!

Sometimes, I’ve been sad as fall arrives, because summer is gone, and I’m really a summer person. Give me a day in the garden, with another day of boating, fishing, and water skiing, and I’ve had a perfect week! But this year, I don’t feel so down about fall. Maybe it’s even a little relief, because I’ve been working so hard in the basement this year that I haven’t had time to keep the flowerbeds and yard all weeded and up to my usual standards. We did have an OK year, with some nice flowers and some good veggies. But I’m a little glad it’s all coming to a close, so I can focus on the one hobby that’s really consuming all of my attention — finishing the basement!

OK, well, going to the master gardener class this fall is going to get in the way of some of that basement work, too, so I guess I won’t be *totally* focused.

For my birthday, I got a great Sigma 70-300mm APO DG zoom lens for my Canon digital SLR. With this digital camera, that lens is almost an 11x zoom! Pretty darn cool. It has a nice macro function that allows you to take these ultra closeups from four feet away. I’m having a lot of fun with it, both in macro mode and otherwise, as you can see:

Starting at the top, from left to right, these are:

1. A spreading petunia I grew from cuttings taken a year ago in downtown Salt Lake City
2. Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’ - a great fall flower
3. A bee on Caryopteris clandonensis - these are VERY attractive to bees and are constantly buzzing once they start to flower in August
4. Zinnia ‘Profusion White’ in a closeup
5. The same zinnias
6. Another spreading petunia grown from last year’s cuttings - this one grows taller but still spreads out
7. The view of my arbor with Pink Simplicity roses in their second wave of bloom - this wave was at its peak a few weeks ago
8. Some very nice ‘Golden Vicary’ Privet shrubs (the tall ones) - these have proven to be a great plant in my yard; I didn’t appreciate them much at first, but they add a nice texture and color to the greenery

I did not notice frost on my lawn this morning, but I did notice that as I drove through the middle of American Fork on my way to work that the houses had frost on their roofs. That’s the first sign of frost that I’ve seen yet this season. But we are heading into another warm spell this week, starting today. So, my green beans should continue developing. I think they need another week or two to produce a crop.

This reminds me of something amazing I learned on the GardenWeb Rocky Mountain Gardening forum recently. When it gets cold and the tomato plants start to die off, you can cut them off at the ground, hang them upside down in the garage or basement (out of sunlight) and the green tomatoes will slowly continue to ripen. Skybird on the forum says she was picking tomatoes from a vine hung in her garage all the way into January! Wow! I’ll be definitely doing that next month. She recommended using a thick rubber band looped around the base of the stalk, because as it dries out, the stalk will shrink, and it might come loose from a string and fall on the floor.

I have been accepted to the Utah County Master Gardener program starting in October. I’ll be taking a class twice a week until December and then doing 40 hours of community work in the next year to earn the certificate. I’m excited about this! I’ll be writing more about what I learn in the class in the coming months. I’m looking forward to increasing my knowledge about garden care, diagnosing and treating plant problems, and hopefully there will be some element of garden design involved, although I’m not sure there will be.

Maybe as part of my community service for this, I can create a website for the Utah County program, because they really don’t have any info one can readily find online.

My beautiful Japanese maple in front of my house has a disease or something. I’m worried about it. This one main branch and all the smaller branches that shoot off of it are dying. It started with some leaves turning red about a month ago, and now they’ve shriveled up. Some of the smaller twigs turned black, but the thicker part of the branch is still green. I’m going to post on GardenWeb to see what kind of answers I can get.

The rest of the tree looks just fine, as shown in this photo. What should I do? Should I cut off that branch as far down the tree as I can go? How will I know the disease or pest hasn’t started attacking other parts of the tree? Is there a pesticide that could help inoculate the rest of the tree against whatever is harming this branch?

OK, starting at the top, from left to right:

The Pink Simplicity roses are in their second wave of bloom, and it’s starting to look pretty darn good!

These bright pink petunias are the best flowering ones in my garden. They really are that bright — the photo was not modified to increase saturation or pump up the color in any way.

The white flowers are Zinnia ‘Profusion White.’ They’re working out quite well and are blooming nonstop since sometime in July.

Those red, tall spikes are Salvia ‘Lady in Red.’ I didn’t know they would get so big when I planted them, but I like them a lot.

The bottom left photo shows a small part of the lab-lab vine I planted next to the backyard arbor. I should have gotten these plants in the ground much sooner this year, because they don’t have enough time to get very tall this year.

And finally, my Caryopteris shrubs are in full bloom now, and the bees are loving that!

1. I love these giant Hibiscus moscheutos flowers.
2. I LOVE this digital SLR camera we got last spring!!! (It’s a Canon Digital Rebel XT)

Kind of like peaches ‘n’ cream, tonight I had nectarines and vanilla ice cream (that really good, double-churned, extra smooth Breyer’s). These are the Mericrest variety of nectarines. They taste pretty much like peaches (perhaps slightly more bitter than a peach?) but they have no fuzz, so their skin is completely edible. The skin has a deep red color, which is repeated in the color of the pit and the flesh immediately around the pit. The red makes a nice-looking accent — these could make for a good-looking culinary masterpiece-type dessert! I do like the way the red shows up in the cobbler I’ve made before.

I have learned a couple of things about my nectarines this year:

1. I will not leave them on the tree this long next year. I waited until they were ripe on the tree, but that makes them spoil too fast. I keep throwing out moldy or oozing ones. Next year, I’ll have to pick a little earlier, while they’re still somewhat firm and let them ripen on the kitchen counter.
2. Someone told me this year to put them in brown paper bags, and they ripen better that way. This may work, but because some of them were getting soft on the outside, they got moldy inside the paper bags.
3. So, next year, I’ll pick in mid-August and place them in bags and see what happens.

Now these are some *cool* flowers! Don’t you think? This is one of the Hibiscus moscheutos plants I have in large pots on my backyard deck. This one was much later to flower than the other this year, but it’s great to see multiple flowers opening up at once. My hunch is that they would flower sooner in the summer, but they get half-day shade on my covered deck, which may have slowed down the flower development.

The guy who sent these seeds to me (from a trade on GardenWeb.com) said their parent was ‘Blue River II,’ but it turns out that the seed had some cross fertilization from other Hibiscus plants.  ‘Blue River II’ has pure white flowers. But I like these! I think they’re very cool flowers. Nice and tropical-looking.

I am sometimes out in the garden late at night, because I can’t make the time during daylight hours to get things done. I was pulling weeds till dark a few days ago, but that gets a little dangerous, because I sometimes pull out a flower, thinking it’s a weed when I can’t see well. So, last night, I knew I needed to pick more nectarines, because they’re really quite ripe on the tree now, and some are falling off while others are getting too squishy. I did some in the evening, with my toddler (cute little McKay LOVES to eat nectarines now — you should see him go at it with gusto, while the juice drips down his chin!). But I couldn’t finish, since there are *so many* of them on the tree. So, I was outside at 11:00 pm, with a ladder and three big bowls, trying to finish. Still didn’t get it all done — just too many on the tree! OK, not too many, but a lot. Anyway, it was pretty hard to see what I was doing, even with the floodlights on in the backyard.

Afterward, I sat down to watch a little of the Republican National Convention on the DVR, but I fell asleep sitting there and woke up at 1 am to trudge upstairs to bed. Now, I’m tired today.