A Weekend of Gardening: Trees

Trees
I also pruned up the Chaste tree and the Mexican Orchid tree over the weekend, and planted the Elm tree that I found in the front bed into the back yard:

Elm tree dug up and waiting to be re-planted. 

Elm tree in its new home. 

the yard and Orchid Tree before!  D: 

yard and Orchid tree after! 

Raven lounging in one of the holes he likes to dig to sit in!  (Argh).  This was *before* all the yardwork,
obviously.  It doesn't look it in this shot, but that little Chaste Tree he's sitting under is as tall as me now! 

WHEW!!!  I seriously put like 18 hours in on the yard this weekend, all told.  And before you think you're finished reading?  There's more.  Tomorrow.


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A Weekend of Gardening: Sunday

More work on the yard and gardens!

Back Yard

• Moved the Sweet Autumn Clematis from the side of the porch (where the wall trellis used to be) to the corner nearby, where there's ain Ikea headboard on the fence as a trellis. :) 
• Set up a teepee over the Clematis Romantika made of tomato spiral stakes, and fenced it in to protect against gallivanting canines
• Planted one of the Rosemary clones from the front into the back along the fence
• mowed the yard
• fed the compost bin with TONS of grass clippings, fresh leaves, dead leaves

Sweet Autumn Clematis, on the Ikea headboard in the corner behind the porch and
"vegetable garden", LOL

Clematis Romantika teepee and enclosure. 

Rosemary clone, leaning against a dead tree branch I'm using as a stake for now.  

A Gaura I found growing at the base of my Mulberry Tree

Daisy hunting lizards in the Mexican Orchid Tree, before pruning and mowing

One more tomorrow - trees! 

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A Weekend of Gardening: Saturday

Holy crud, I did a lot of work in the yard this weekend!

Front Yard and Garden

• Mowed the yard
• Hoed and weeded the front garden bed
• Planted the Fernleaf Lavender in the front bed, that's been in a pot on the porch for weeks
• Found a wee elm tree in the front bed!  Hooray for volunteer trees! 
• Cut down a big, overgrown Gorizia Rosemary in the front yard that was in. The. Way.  In the process, I discovered SIX clones that had layered themselves off the main plant!  I moved one to the back yard, and heeled in the other five to give to friends.  

This was basically a giant Yarrow patch before.  

Fernleaf Lavender (Lavandula multifida)

The first roses and buds of the year. These start out yellow, then ripen to a pretty pale cream. 

Goodbye, Rosemary.  

Rosemary clones heeled in to open space in the front bed, awaiting pickup. 

More tomorrow!


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"Vegetable Garden"

As I said, I won't be able to have a "real" vegetable garden this year - at least not until fall.  But in the meantime, I just had to have some tomatoes.  It's been years since I had an actual container garden, and I'm kind of excited to be starting one up again!

New additions to the back porch:

a Serrano pepper

"Juliet" and "Homestead" tomatoes

Despite the complaints from my lower back, I actually had fun digging out the compost bin to fill these pots.  There was some good stuff under there!

After I potted these veggies up, I swept and washed the patio floor, walls, and windows, and hosed off all the furniture, too.  At first I thought I'd have the strawberry on the wall...then the two tomato plants, which, when grown in, should shade that side of the porch a bit, but without blocking light from the living room windows.

Now I'm thinking I may just create a whole container garden out there!  For the time being, though, I need to deal with the two Clematis vines by the side of the porch that are going to need support very soon.

More later this week!


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Back From My Camping Vacation

And boy, am I tired, sunburnt, sore, and swollen.  But it was a great trip, barring a few hairy moments where some friends of mine were injured.  Since I've been back, I've been puttering around with pots and things, and hitting the post-early-spring sales:

The strawberries from the front porch, now potted in the wall urn on the back porch.  

Two tomatoes ("Juliet" cherry and "Beefmaster") and a
Serrano Pepper bought for a buck each at the grocery store. 

A Battle Gnome in the houseplants

 (the foil is a cat deterrent)

My rain-soaked Mexican Orchid Tree (Bauhinia mexicana) beginning
to bloom before it's even fully leafed out!  

Daffodils still blooming after all these years,
in the long-defunct vegetable garden. 

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BRB

I'm heading out for a camping vacation for a week in Mississippi; but first, I wanted to share some pics from my front porch and garden before I go:

The rose in the front garden is getting leafy again.
So are the weeds, but, I'll deal with that when I get back. 

A gardening friend bought me this lovely Bougainvillea yesterday!  

I've moved the buckets from the front door, since the one on the right was getting in the way of the storm door opening
properly.  The Begonias are loving it here, but the ferns...um, apparently not.  Different watering/sunlight needs.
Meanwhile, there's a strawberry still in its nursery pot; and a Fernleaf Lavender that is just taking OFF.  (It's in a real
pot, and you can't even see it, it's grown so fast!) 

Wishing you all lots of green leaves until I get back.  :)


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Mulberry Mulberry, Bear Me a Mul...wait...

Way back in aught-7, I was mowing the grass in the side yard of my house by the back gate.  Ho-hum.  I saw this great big weed I wasn't going to be able to get with the mower, so I stopped the mower and fetched the weed-eater.  On closer inspection, though, I noticed that this giant weed - nearly two feet tall, with enormous shaggy leaves, which, it seemed, had appeared overnight - was actually starting to develop bark on it's lower stems...trunk??

April 2007

I took a bunch of pics and emailed my county extension guys, and the nice folks over at Texas A&M University, and got the same response from both:  it was an American White Mulberry Tree seedling.  Hooray!  A tree! A free tree!  LOL.  I imagine the seed was dropped there by birds. Must be another tree like this nearby.

I very carefully dug it up and transplanted it into the back yard, and then proceeded to baby the living crap out of it.  I'd already gone through two [cottonless] Cottonwood trees in the same spot.  One got ripped out of the ground in high winds, the other had some sort of weird root fungus (which I was hoping, as I planted my free Mulberry, was gone from the soil by now).

June 2007 

August 2007

Yep, you read that right:  all that progress just over a single Summer.  From everything I'd read, a Mulberry tree wouldn't outgrow this half of my yard, but I was beginning to wonder.  (We also had about a billion times more than our usual rainfall that year, so).

Spring 2008

The following Spring the trunk had filled out enough that I removed the stakes and replaced the little wire fence with a spiral of large chunks of limestone, mostly to keep one of my dogs from digging holes underneath it and disturbing the roots.

2009

Just three years in, it began producing the more familiar round-ish leaves that mature Mulberries have.  The shaggy, three-lobed leaves are immature leaves.  I also started getting wee mulberries that mostly either fell off or got eaten by birds before they were able to ripen.  Three years later and the tree is in this same stage:  unripe fruit, and a mix of immature and mature leaves.  I wonder how long this process takes?

In the Fall of 2012, I had to prune this thing for the first time ever.  It'd grown so much that it was now shading nearly half of my tiny backyard, and had some pretty serious water sprouts in places, as well as some low-hanging whip branches that were brushing the ground.  Later in the year, once the leaves dropped, off, I gave it a proper pruning to get rid of all the interior sprouts and crossing branches and things.

I wonder what'll happen this year...