June is here and with it lots of record setting heat and virtually no rain. This year looks like it will be a record breaking year, but not the good records. Even the weeds are having a tough time this year. The good news is that daylilies and iris are both drought tolerant once they have been established. Your plants may look a little peaked, but they should be able to pull through to the fall when they will rebound nicely. There are a couple of strategies that can help them get through the [...]
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I have been asked about wether you should trim bearded iris back at this time of year. You can trim iris back, but you don’t have to. The rule of thumb is that if your bearded iris look pretty ragged at the tips – from lots of very hot days, 2 months early (south Texas this year) – then [...] At the Pearl Farmer’s Market on Saturday several people bought polka dot plants and I told them I would write up a blog on the plants for them. Polka dot plants started off as a house plant until people realized that they were a perfect plant for the shade out here. Polda dot plants have either pink or white dots/blotches on green leaves. They are a shade plant. They also re-seed themselves. They are frost tender, but with trimming they come back in the spring. They do need some water when the tempertatures are at 95 and above – they look a little wilted until they get a dose of water and then they perk right [...] Lately we have been having a rash of jackrabbits (5 -7 at a time) and deer going through our gardens. In fact at least one rabbit is so brave as to try and build a burrow in my main demonstration garden. When you get close he just looks at you and only moves a couple of feet away. Since we don’t have a dig to chase them off, I have started letting my kids run after them. Now it actually pretty funny to watch two 6 year olds running after jackrabbits throughout the yard. Now since I can’t always depend on my kids to be around when the rabbits come into the yard, we are going to try some other measures to keep them out. A friend of mine who runs a good sized farm with lots of vegetables told us that they use fish emulsion 4 – 5 times to deter both the deer and [...] When I moved from California to south Texas, there were a number of plants I had never seen before or worked with in gardening. To name a few – Pride of Barbados, esperanza, clump forming bouganvilla (in California it is always used as a large vine/tree on the sides of houses or fences – but that is another blog), Mexican ruella, and bulbine. When a friend gave me some bulbine initially – I was in such desperate need of anything green that I could garden with (our new house had very little garden space – that has now changed) that I took it, but I wasn’t very impressed. Well that has changed [...] Peacock Orchids are really gladioli. The flowers look like they should be an orchid, hence one of the common names. These are a perennial glad in south Texas. They are also a very easy plant. Plant them in full sun to part [...] Flowering plants that overwinter and multiply by means on fleshy stems of leaves are called bulbs. The bulbs we grow in our gardens today are native to temperate zones all over the world, the woodlands, meadows and mountains of the Mediterranean, Middle East, and North America. The Dutch have been extremely successful over the centuries in collection and hybridizing new species of bulbs and improving them for reliable garden performance. Tulips in particular, once played an important role in the Dutch [...] identifying the snake I heard and then saw this morning while I was weeding! Yes as I was bent over in one of my daylily fields this morning getting rid of some weeds, I heard a rattle. I looked over and sure enough there was a rattlesnake curled up under one of the [...] Deer seem to have taken a vacation from my yard, so for now the daylilies are safe . . They have been allowed to grow and to have scapes and I’ve had some blooms. I don’t know if rains have greened up the deer’s regular grazing areas or if the Bobbex helped to keep them away. But whatever the reason, I am grateful to see some scapes and [...] how to make compost [...] |
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