• Great plants - Our Garden

    Setting sun on crabapples

    November 10, 2008 - By 

    I walked out the front door a few days ago in the evening, and the setting sun was making the tiny crabapples on my tree glow and sparkle. I ran back in to get the camera! This is a Prairiefire crabapple. Sometimes I’ve called in Prairie Fire, but I think the proper name is one word. These fruit are “persistent,” meaning they stay on the tree well into the winter. The birds eat some of them. There are even some left in the spring, when the robins return.? These are a nice small ornamental tree. They’ve been in the ground…

  • Our Garden

    A little fall color in my backyard

    October 28, 2008 - By 

    I missed the perfect week to take a shot of the red maples — they had lost too many leaves this week, but here’s a cool closeup. We’ve actually been quite warm this week and much of last — over 70° for seven of the past 12 days. That’s pretty impressive for late October on the Wasatch Front, don’t you think? This is probably the official Last Rose of Autumn for me. Well, it’s the last in my hedge of Pink Simplicity roses, although I still do have some sprays of Ruby Meidiland roses blooming along the front walkway to…

  • Our Garden - Weather

    Snow!

    October 13, 2008 - By 

    Winter rushed in this weekend like a dandelion going to seed. OK, maybe that’s a silly simile. But it did come really fast! My remote thermometer said it got down to 26° on Sunday morning, and it’s been at or below 30° each morning for the past three days. We had some snow on Sunday morning, including this interesting juxtaposition of snow on the pretty little Meidiland roses along my front walk. The snow melted by Sunday afternoon. It’s actually supposed to warm up again this week, getting back into the 70s. But these hard freezes have done their damage,…

  • Flowers - Garden design - Others' gardens - Our Garden

    A visit to Temple Square

    October 11, 2008 - By 

    Earlier this week, I took my camera to work and took a walk to Temple Square during my lunch hour. I wanted to get a few shots of the long, narrow flowerbeds by the lawn between Temple Square and the church office building. I could use some ideas to make my long, narrow beds look better next year. Here’s an example I can learn a few things from. Note how it has that curvy line of red/magenta undulating through the bed, tying it all together. All of that red color is from the same type of geranium, repeated over and…

  • Our Garden

    Green bean harvest!

    October 9, 2008 - By 

    This is the first time I’ve grown green beans, and they turned out pretty good. I harvested most of them on Sunday, October 5th. They were planted on July 23rd, so that made 74 days till harvest. The package said they’d be ripe in 60 days, but I imagine the cold nights have slowed them down, since it was a late planting. Plus, I probably could have fertilized that soil, although I did grow peas there in the spring, and they’re supposed to add nitrogen to the soil, so perhaps it was more fertile than I thought. The harvest wasn’t…

  • Fruits & Veggies - Master Gardener Stuff - Our Garden

    Started Master Gardener class — answer on my apple problem

    October 7, 2008 - By 

    Last Thursday, I started the Master Gardener class with Utah State University Extension at Thanksgiving Point. Larry Sagers is the primary instructor — he’s the guy who does the KSL Radio Greenhouse Show on Saturday mornings and writes a gardening column in the Deseret News. By the way, I want to know why the D-News doesn’t give him a columnist page for looking up his archived columns! But you can see several of his latest on their Home & Garden page. I’m looking foward to learning a lot more technical horticulture stuff in this class. I’m also happy to be…

  • Our Garden

    Fall color on the mountains by our house

    September 28, 2008 - By 

    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…

  • Our Garden

    I got a new zoom/macro lens for my SLR

    September 27, 2008 - By 

    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: A spreading petunia I grew from cuttings taken a year ago in downtown Salt Lake City Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’ –…