English Ivy

I totally killed my English Ivy.

I was hopping that it dropped it's leafs due to the winter and not because of me. The internet said that it was supposed to be evergreen so that answered that. Apperntly they like to dry out a little and I kinda over watered it.

After the new years I'll try taking in one of the little pots with baby succulents in it. I have no idea what type they are but they seem to be hardy little things. I managed to grow the babes from planting their leafs. So there is hope.

I also got an orchid for a gift from one of my bosses. It is doing well. So far. It is tiny and cute and still has flowers. Here's hopping.

Weird Vine & Gourd

So I 'saved' a weird vine at work a few weeks ago and no it has thrown out roots. So far they seem to just be on one side of the plant. I think they are starting to show on the other but I won't hold my breath. I am going to keep it small. with luck more branches will pop out this spring/summer. that would be very nice


Now.. the gourd... is dead.

And by dead I mean almost rotten to the point of my nose running away. I think tonight I'll hit a craft store and get the right powder to dry it out. the only problem I foresee is cleaning them out so nothing rots again.

Traumatized Gourd

I am in the proses of traumatizing a hapless gourd.

Why?

My computer at work has been down for over a week. Monday was the last straw for my ADD and I started to poke one of my decorative gourds with a needle. I had wanted to take it home to hollow and dry but kept forgetting it.

Now it has salt and tissues in it. I blame my limited resources at work.

So... If this works I might be doing the same to the other five gourds on my desk. The office is very dry so the mold has been kept at bay. So I can wait to see what happens before I have to worry about the others.

Oi...

So, at my parents house we have several burning bushes. They are very nice and one had a smaller bush that was about 3 feet talk when I noticed it over the summer. I heard they back bud wonderfully. Even on old wood.

Imagine my surprise when I wander over to talk to my dad so he doesn't cut it. Only to see the guilty look and lo! It has been chopped in half. I think he forgot it was there when he was trimming the bigger bush. Which is fine since now it will be easier to dig up and handle. If only we could have one more good weekend to work out side prior to snow fall.

I don't want to style it as a broom but the trunk is strait as a pencil. Maybe after I get it out of the ground something will jump out at me?

Butterfly Bush & Mums

The butterfly bush was put into the ground this weekend. It is now a very happy butterfly bush that has put out new growth. Hopefully this will not harm it and it will come back next year.

My mums... or mum... whatever, it is doing very well. Unfortunately after my mom complemented it she said that they have had bad luck planting them and getting them to live. I was not a happy camper when I heard this. I need to do some research to see if there is any way to try and coax it into living through the winter.

Other then that we had a rather large wind storm last night. The wind was stronger near the tops of the trees so all the leafs are still in the back yard. All the warm weather that we had been having seems to have left with the storm. my co-workers were joking about the snow coming soon. :-(

Wild Grape as Bonsai pt2

I tried popping onto Google for trimming advice. A lot of what I found was for killing wild grape vines and people saying that they were invasive. This boggles me to no end because they are a natrual species.

Oi.

So I'm getting around in the same circle. I don't want it to louse its shape. I also don't want it to try putting out fruit before I really know what I'm doing. What I want it to do is put out a few more suckers lower down the mail trunk to bulk it up. But what I want is not necessarily what will happen.

Mystery fungus

Don't you just love these sot of things?

The mystery fungus was bright orange and created lots of little points on the underside of one of my poplars. Said poplar is now residing in the trash waiting for garbage day. My dad insisted on tossing it, I was pretty pissed but agreed.

I'll just skip over the giant argument of were the poplar got infected and if it would come back if the sapling was defoliated.

Fortunately we have a lot of poplars in the yard so even thought I lost a whole growing season on one plant, I can still not loose the time I spent working on it. That knowledge doesn't make me any happier though. :-(

Fall Bonsai Care pt2

My new and improved list of things I need to do just got longer and shorter at the same time.

1) Watering.
I seriously have to adjust how I water my plants. I thought I had lessened my watering enugh untill I picked up my Cotoneaster and spilled a ton of water about. Because it's tray is attached to it's temp pot I had to tip it to drain the built up water. This is what I get for not useing the chopstick method for watering.

The chopstick method is to take a cheep take-out chopstick and stick it in the soil of your pot. Some people say to go for the root ball and others say the edge. Right now I place it in between the root ball and the edge of the pot. This works very well for real bonsai soil.

2) Move bonsai to a new location or more protected location.
This makes sense to me just because I have frozen a pot and watched it slowly brake apart during the winter. my dad has put pots in the ground to prevent the roots of the plant from dieing. But due to my inability to keep things alive I found I have mostly saplings. I'm still not sure were I'm going to put with my Cotoneaster yet.

3) Plant saplings outside to encorage growth.
I have a nice spot on the side of the house. Almost everything I have is going to be planted there. I have marble tiles in the basement that I am going to put under them so I don't have to dig deep when they are ready to be truly worked on.

The whole 'put it in the ground and forget it' advice shtick is heavily thrown in your face if you are brand new or not sure when you should start to gently guide your plants. I have seen people post such a response on some forums and nothing else or seem to get hostile. If you have been in this situation then just play with your tree in a pot. you will get a feel for it and know when to stick it in the ground. :3

4) Protecting the plants in the ground.
At my house we have bunnies, moles and chipmunks that will eat anything they can reach during the winter. My dad has some finer chicken wire that they should not be able to get through so I am going to make a good sized cover from it. Tall enough to protect the tops after I stick the thing as deep as I can the the little buggers can't dig in to get them.

Beyond the four things I have listed I'm not sure what else I can do. I wish I could stick things in my basement because it's cold enough to let them go dormant, but I just don't know.

Fall Bonsai Care

I started moving some of my non-blizzard tolerant plants into the Florida room. It's basically a porch closed off with sliding glass doors so it isn't temperature controlled. But it does offer a bit of protection until i can set something up inside.

Yes, I'm committing the cardinal sin of bonsai. Keeping the plant inside!

My hope is to clear out my shelves in the garage again.  It worked last year for the maple and juniper. I think I'll sneak them into my dads boat so they get a little more protection. This is far from the perfect situation, but I still live at home and my mom doesn't like plants inside.

Which doesn't stop me from taking them inside any how.

Fortunately the Sequoya will be safe in the kitchen along with my lavender. With the orchids and other things that haven't died on me yet. I have a few poplars that I am going to put in the ground. They are far too small for anything right now. with luck the rabbits and moles won't eat them.

Grapevine Bonsai

I-er don't have on per say. What I do have is a ill kept grapevine in a pot. It is very scraggly if you peek at it past the leafs that it put out this summer.

See, in the beginning I did surf around looking at what few I could find on the internet. At around $65 a pop I decided that I would try and cultivate my own. Silly me believed that it wouldn't be all that hard.

My first problem was locating a Grapevine that I could dig up. Second to that was finding the roots to dig up. Ad to that one that was legal to did up because I did not want to spend money on permits and the such. Fortunately my boss suggested digging up ones that were growing in our court yard that was being dug up. I ended up getting several plants from there. A mulberry, several mystery plants and one itty bitty twig of a grapevine with a smattering of roots. Since it had roots growing in two sections I had to stick it into a deep pot, which isn't much use for a bonsai's shallow pot.

So my next brilliant idea was to root cuttings.

Out of about a dozen different cuttings only one survived. A few died right off the back. The one that lived didn't have a visible root for around 3 months. That lone root is now growing feeder roots like it was going out of style. As soon as there are enough roots I'm sticking it into a pot. Right now the roots are at the base of the cutting and would be very shallow. Sadly it's a very twiggy looking cutting.

As of right now I am on the side of Grapevines not making very cheep nor very good bonsai. Maybe in a few years I'll look back and change my mind.

Bonsai Master

I had a wonderful conversation with a master named Danny on Saturday. I never realise how much you could only understand in person.

Best conversation ever.

I didn't get advice so much as why certain things are done. The internet is full of how to do this but not why it's done and why it works. In the one hour that I talked with Danny, we covered so much, things just started making sense.

He has even purchased a bonsai from Japan.

He did not tell me what he spent on it. But he did tell me that it was over 300 pears old when he purchased it. There was a ream of paper work documenting every single person that had ever worked on it. He also said there were fees and paper work to get the tree into the US. When he got the tree, he met the son of the former owner for a moment. The son had carried the tree on the plane on his lap from Japan to Seattle (Danny is from New York, another round trip plane ticket.) to hand it off. Then he hopped onto another plane back to Japan. This was added to the price of course.

Then after all this, his wife found out what he had spent on the tree. That ended up costing him a diamond necklace with matching earrings.

Now, what he did tell me was what it is/was insured for back in the day when he bought it. $25,000. He said that today the tree is worth more then what he insured it for. I just about dies at the price. He laughed at my reaction.

The conversation just covered so much in that one hour that I was a little over whelmed. I am going to do my best to go to the bonsai sociaties meeting in October. It will be their auction meeting so I'm going to bring a very limited amount of cash with me. He said the lowest price he usually see's is around $350. but who knows? Maybe I can walk away with something everyone gave up on.

Trumpet Vines

This past spring my aunt gave me three little Red Trumpet Vine plants.

Her plant is very well behaved and very, very old. So old that I thought it was some kind of tree before it bloomed. It puts out good sized red-orange blooms. And did I mention that it's well behaved?

The three little plants are not.

They are also no longer little. There are several 4-5 foot vines on each plant. If they were growing up something this wouldn't be a problem but they are in a pot on the deck. I looked into a pre-made trellis and they were far too expensive. Even at Walmart.

I might put one out by a large tree in the back yard for it to grow on. I think it would look very nice out there. The problem would be convincing my parents of this.

I have a feeling they won't put out flowers until next year.

Rosebush

I love roses.

I have two orange climbing roses that are not doing all that well. I think one might even be dead, but it is mostly blocked by Black-eyed Susann's right now. When they are dormant I am going to move them to another part of the yard. I would put them into a pot by they probably wouldn't survive the winter.

My other rose is in a pot. It is trimmed like a tree but looks like a ball on a stick. When in bloom it has the palest orange blossoms. I really love it. I don't know how far back I should trim it. On one hand I'd like it to get bigger. But if I trim it back it might throw out more blooms.

Next weekend I'm going to call my aunt to see what she has to say about roses.

Home Grown: Peppers

Peppers seem to be one of the easyer things for me to grow on my deck. They have been very forgiving if i forget to water them in the morning. Thy don't complain if they get blown over in the wind. And if I keep watch on them I can get a huge payload of tasty tasty food.

My Sweet Banana Peppers have been producing like good little troopers. I have a gallon freezer bag in the freezer right now. I have over a dozen on my counter to cut and clean before I can put them in the freezer as well. I put them in & on everything that I think will taste better because of them. I will mix fried chopped bits into my macaronir & cheese. I put them on my pizza. These are a very good idea to grow if you like them and a good bank for your buck.

I have grown Cayenne Peppers before. We dried them and didn't use them for about a year. At that time my dad was making cajun creole and needed more cayenne powder. So he just grabbed what we had and ground it. When he tasted it his eyes were bigger then the moon. He said the homegrown peppers were far hotter then the store bought powder. Next summer we will be growing more. Unfortunately we do not know if letting them dry on the bush made them hotter. Either way I think I'm going to trim them as they get red and put them on a string to dry.

I have only tried growing Bell Peppers once. They need a alot of water and mine did not do very well in pots on the deck. They would always be dry and wiltty by the afternoon. If I had the space to plant them in the ground I'm sure they would do better.

The Scotch Bonnet. I grew one plant once by accident. I had it in a pot that was far too small for it so I only got two peppers to grow on it. One was chomped by a chipmunk. The one that did survive dried poorly and we ended up tossing it.

Wind Damage

I found out yesterday that the wind had blown over most of our low growing plants. Unfortunately the view when I pulled up was blocked by taller plants that had not blown over.

One that fell over was my butterfly bush. It was very willty. With luck it will come back.

This past weekend.

So, last week I was deadheading my blue butterfly bush and almost grabbed a spider. I have a little arachnophobia so this caused me some alarm. And dancing and flailing of my arms. Thankfully no one saw me but still... It would have been quite entertaining.

So! I managed to get the little spider onto a stick and tossed the stick into the grass thinking that was that.


Unfortunatly this weekend I think I found the same spider back on the same plant. Again i was about to grab the dead flower head to nip it. And again I danced and flailed about.

I also promptly went inside for the rest of that day.

With luck it will have moved on to greener pastures since then and I can go back to making my bush look nice so it can grow more flowers. Because the Clearwing Hummingbird Moth is back and oh so pretty. :3

The art of Killing Plants.

Or more recently Bonsai.

Almost bonsai. potential bonsai. Potensai? Lord knows what to call bonsai before they are true Bonsai.

But this is also the place I will be posting my gardening epic fails and wins. With luck I will have more wins... but I feel that this might not be the case.