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…
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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…
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I love these giant Hibiscus moscheutos flowers. I LOVE this digital SLR camera we got last spring!!! (It’s a Canon Digital Rebel XT)
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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…
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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…
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I decided this year to leave the nectarines on the tree longer, because many of them were a little too tart last year. They are really getting good now! I’ve harvested a few small batches of them in the past week, and there are many more still on the tree. Birds are getting to the them, and some fell off in the wind yesterday, so I need to get out there and pick the rest of them, I think. Perhaps there are still some hard ones that I’ll leave on the tree a little longer, but I think they should…
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Wow a whole month without posting! I am chagrined to have not posted here for all of August. I don’t have much time to put into it this year, since I’m working much of my free time doing construction in my basement (now shooting for finishing it within a month or so!). Anyway, here’s some good news from the garden — we harvested our first round of corn on August 24th. This is that Mirai corn I ordered from Parks seed in 2007 but didn’t plant till this year. I wrote about it when I ordered the seeds, and I…
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I planted green beans last week on the 23rd. I hope there is still enough time for them to grow before fall frosts. I think it’ll work — they’re supposed to ripen in 60 days. Yesterday (the 26th), I trimmed the roses to get rid of all the spent bud growth. This photo shows how the wind was blowing in a cool little storm we had last night, but you can also see the shorter, trimmed rose hedge. Hopefully, we’ll see a good rebloom on them in three weeks when we have all of my employees over for a barbecue.…