My hostas are blooming right now, and the groundcover, Lamium maculatum, still has scattered blooms, but not as well as when it first bloomed in May.
I’m quite happy to see my Rocky Mountain Maple doing so well, too. This was grown from seed in 2006 and it’s just leaping in height this year!
My little milk jugs have some more seeds sprouting in them now. I mentioned a few days ago that the Alyssum were sprouting. Now I also have the California poppies sprouting, and just the beginning of some action with the Lychnis. I think the Callirhoe are starting to sprout, too, because I believe I’m seeing…
After two+ years of renting a townhouse, my wife and I are buying a sweet house in a short sale. Closing at the end of January. The new house is in the Suncrest area of Draper, Utah. This is up on a ridge, 1,700 feet above the valley floor (same area where we’ve been renting…
I just learned something new this week. It turns out petunias aren’t true annuals — they’re really tender perennials that die when they freeze. So, I can overwinter them in the basement and plant them out again next spring. And they grow well from cuttings. So, I plan to make some cuttings from my pink…
Wow! After living here for seven winters, this one just seems to stretch on and on and on! We’ve had snow on the ground constantly since mid-December, if I’m remembering right; that’s almost a month-and-a-half of snow on the ground. In past winters, the snow has always melted within two days after a storm, except…
I’ve been waiting to harvest the Granny Smith apples, because they haven’t been ripening well this year. It could be a number of factors, including the spider mites that attacked the leaves this year, probably making it less productive of sugars, and it could be that our fall got really cold in mid-September and stayed…
Yesterday, I pruned my nectarine tree, the three butterfly bushes, and did some tinkering with the apple and cherry trees. The butterfly bushes (buddleia or sometimes called buddleja) are easy — you just chop ’em down to about 12″ high. They’re just a clump of old stubs now. But soon, new stalks will rise from…
Oh no. I hate to say this, but the more I look at that maple, the more I think it might actually be a box elder tree. Ugghh! I don’t want a stinking box elder tree!