Friday, July 26, 2019

Garlic and Potato Harvest. Garden Pics.

Yukon Gold Potatoes and Pattypans

Garlic

Butternut Squash....future batch of soup for the winter

Dixi Blueberries

More Pattypans

Thornless Blackberries


Snack

Saturday, June 15, 2019

Little outdoor shelf for greenhouse orchids

Every summer my greenhouse gets way too hot for orchids. So I’ve taken to setting up a little shelf for them on the deck. The temperature being much more orchid friendly. I moved the few I had left in there today to the little shelf. I have several more to move out for summer from the house. 


These are the first full set of blossoms I’ve had on this unknown variety of oncidium. {it has been suggested that it is an Odontocidium Catatante... I think it might be}
I think it is pretty exquisite. Four large branches are almost ready to flower on it. It will be so lovely. 


A new variety of geranium. Raspberry Twizzle. My sister and I both bought one. 
We have completely different taste in flowers, so that was a first. 

Friday, May 17, 2019

Snake Plant flowers



I have had Snake Plants off and on all of my life. I bought this one to help clean the air in my house. They are the number one plant for air purification! I was stunned one day to notice a little spike. A flower spike!! I didn’t know they flowered!! A couple days ago the flowers opened. Aren’t they pretty. What you can’t see in the photos is that they open fully in the evening and then emit a very strong sweet smell in the air. 

Wednesday, May 08, 2019

Tuesday, May 07, 2019

A lovely new Phalaenopsis Orchid





I can’t believe the root growth on this orchid. It also has what looks like a new flower spike forming (it already has two) and either a new flower branch or Keiki forming on the flower stalk. It is a spectacularly vigorous and beautiful plant. 

Sunday, May 05, 2019

My rhododendron is spectacular this year


I planted this rhododendron in the spring of 1980. It is now about 7’ tall. It has never been this covered with flowers before. 
I wonder if it was the February snowfall that did it?


Wednesday, May 01, 2019

Look at all the new leaves on the citrus trees!











I am so thrilled at the progress my citrus trees are making. Look at the new lovely green leaves. There are hundreds of them. Up until now, the few new leaves I would get, were pale green soon to fade to yellow. Now I am throwing everything I have at it. I spend at least ten minutes a day looking them over carefully. I find about 2-3 tiny baby scales per day and scrape and squash them. I look under leaves for spider mites and will again spray as soon as I see any. I spray the leaves top and bottom whenever I water the trees. As well I gave them Jobes Fruit Tree and Citrus spikes. I had let things get totally out of control and it took sulphur spray and horticultural oil to kill the massive scale infestation. I am an organic gardener, so I have done things with these trees I normally would not do. But I want to get them healthy and strong and then switch to completely organic after that. 

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Strawberry bed thinned and replanted



So after a year of not being able to garden, I am playing catch up. I have a bed of strawberry’s that originated from three tiny plants that were rescued from the house next door. The old strawberry bed was literally covered over with weeds. Buttercup and other root spreading weeds. So I was not able to just dig out a few from underneath the cover of weeds and plant them. They would have been full of weed roots. So I had to dig out a few small strawberry plants and literally undo the weed roots from the strawberry’s. I then planted them in pots so that I could pull them out if weeds started to grow, and undo the roots again and replant. After several months, the three plants were then planted in the garden and allowed to ‘run’. I pegged runners to make more plants. I shared a lot of runners, but they still got a bit out of control last year while I recovered from my broken shoulder. Today was the day I was able to dig out some, rearrange others and I now have a proper strawberry bed. It took several years, but here we are.

You may wonder why I went to all this trouble for these plants and didn’t just buy new plants. Well...I have done that many times over forty years, trying many varieties. They were nice enough, but when we finally got a few berries off of these plants, we were thrilled to find out they were the largest, reddest, sweetest and most delicious strawberries any of us had ever tasted. I dug out all of the other varieties I was growing and set about propagating these. I have no idea what the variety is, but they remind me of strawberries my grandparents grew in Ontario when I was little. So I will have these until the day I die. Seriously. Yummmm.


Sunday, April 28, 2019

African Violets...I’ve been doing it wrong for decades



I have a bit of a soft spot for African Violets. I love how old school and beautiful they are. I have never had any luck reflowering them after the original flowers die. I bought two this past year, and I have been treating them very well! Fertilizing, water, everything I can think of. But as usual, no flowers. So I googled ‘why African Violets don’t flower’. Well.....I have no idea where I got the idea about forty years ago, that African Violets could not take any sun, but I must have read it somewhere.....I was completely wrong. It is sunlight that makes them flower and I have never given them any. So I’ve moved my two Violets up to the window. Look, give them enough sun and this is what happens. 

Saturday, April 27, 2019

The ‘Hedge from Hell’ is gone!!!

Here is a picture of what the ‘hedge’ looked like before. 






Oh happy day. The family behind us are building a garage in their back yard and the awful Leylandii Cyprus hedge that was over 30’ feet tall and grew about 12’ into our yard....is gone. They shortened it considerably about a year ago which gave us so much sun in our back yard, it was glorious. This is a dream come true. Here are some photos of the removal. 









You can see that there is a tree in there that is about a foot across. That wonderful 
machine pulled that tree out in about a minute. It was incredible. 




Saturday, March 02, 2019

Victoria Orchid Show. What a lovely day.

This incredibly beautiful orchid is called Laeliocattleya Drumbeat ‘Heritage’ It was the best in show winner. I was so awestruck I did not get a shot of the whole plant. It is about three feet across and had may be 30-50 or orchids on it. The most beautiful and spectacular plant I’ve seen in 40 years of growing. 



I bought a tiny Dendrobium Amethystoglossum like this. 

I was looking for one of these, but there were none to be had. 
Oncidium Sphacelatum. 




This is a Pinterest photo of an Oncidium Twinkle ‘Pink Perfection’. 
I went to the orchid show with a wish list. This was on the list and I found a very small one. I am pretty excited!!!


I bought a medium size Paphiopedilum Yi-Ying Morning Sun. 
(This is not my plant just a lovely image from the internet)


Blc King of Taiwan
A very large flowered beautiful orchid I chose. (Also not my actual plant)

Saturday, February 16, 2019

And to think we don’t usually get snow on Vancouver Island

Snow almost filling up our deck

Snow half way up the greenhouse and almost burying my blueberry bushes

Backyard and gardens buried

The fence over on the right back is five feet tall


We had robins in the willow all week. 
They were feasting on our holly berries the whole time


The street before it got really bad


Early on in the snowfall through my kitchen window