Tag: rainbow garden

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04/16/2023 blue life

Perennial blue flax (Linum lewisii) is doing beautifully in its second year!
We thought the mealy blue sage was dead in the rainbow garden as the one by the porch has been up for a while now, but this morning I noticed leaves! It lives! Maybe just less warm and sheltered out here in the side yard?
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04/15/2023 spring at home in person

Mystery green bit in caliche planter. Looks suspiciously like a grass but we’ll find out! Maybe something good!
The yellow irises from Judy are in full bloom now!
One of the two Camassia scilloides has TWO flower buds!
The other Camassia scilloides has a much smaller flower bud. The angusta has a similar sized bud that is on a shorter stalk as of yet.
The two leaf senna is coming back! This one got big last year and made a lot of seeds.
The other smaller two leaf senna from last year is off to a great start this season!
I put a lot of Missouri fluttermill primrose seeds in the yellow area of the rainbow garden )near the two leaf senna) and one is coming up! Yay!
The dwarf spiderwort continues to bloom! This one has two flowers now! The other individual hasn’t flowered yet.
This mystery grass has appeared in many areas under the oak tree. It seems wrong for millet but I don’t remember wheat in the bird seed mix? Any ideas are welcome. iNaturalist suggests the wheat genus but I don’t think there are any native ones here.
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04/09/2023 spring at home

All photos by Paula as she is the one at home! Thank you Paula!

Perennial blue flax blooming!
A few peach flowers are turning into peaches in spite of the hard frost!
Camassia angusta isn’t ready to bloom.
But it looks like Camassia scilloides is thinking about blooming!! Mom says this is the species she sees at home in north central Texas.
Last but not least the front yard lyre leaf sage is spreading nicely and has a bloom!
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04/03/2023 fruit trees before we left

Williams pride apple is blooming.
Seckel pear has started to leaf out and the Liberty apple behind it too.
I think this one is the bud on the Arkansas Black Apple. Or maybe McIntosh. I forget already. Update: Paula checked and it’s McIntosh.
Butterfly milkweed coming up in the rainbow garden!
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04/01/2023 earwig night one survived!

The Agastache survived with its defensive ring of petroleum jelly. Gonna have to go buy another tube.
The Blackfoot daisy made it overnight!
The second daisy made it too! There are fewer earwigs in the rock garden.
Paula pointed out last night that our other agastaches that got completely chomped by earwigs are putting up new shoots.
Here’s the second one also having a tiny sprout.
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03/31/2023 thanks past self!

Past me ordered plants in the winter!
Pets very much liked the box. It had good smells. Here Gram steps right in before I’ve unpacked the crinkle paper.
Good thing there was cardboard protecting the plants too.
Gram moved to sit on the crinkle paper and smells one of two Blackfoot daisies. Briar observes. We put the daisies in the rock garden. I had one in the backyard once when we first moved here but I think it was too wet. The rock garden is the driest hottest spot in the yard.
The other plant we got was an orange Agastache. The damn invasive human-introduced earwig horde has already started eating it, so we are trying petroleum jelly around the base. It has worked for tomatoes before but didn’t work on a different Agastache recently, so we’ll go back out before bed and check again.
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03/24/2023 Friday mildly mysterious

Mystery plants in rock garden.
Mystery plant in rock garden. In the right place for where I put scarlet pea but maybe too pointy leaves? We shall see.
I think a Houstonia bluet and a baby ponysfoot.
This is in the right place for fuzzy beans.
I suspect this is also a fuzzy bean (Strophostyles sp).
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03/19/2023 after hard overnight freeze of 20 F

Kieffer pear leaves look fine.
A lot (or all?) peach flowers look wilted. This is okay, because it is such a young tree I want it to concentrate on growing, not fruiting. it looks like the leaves are coming out okay without wilting.
The agastaches in backyard planter are fine. These just-transplanted ones are less fine, but something has been nibbling on them too (we’ll assume earwigs…). I think the front one made it but it’s hard to tell on the back one because it was mostly chewed up.
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12/2022 backlog of infrastructure and little babies

Yesterday, 12/31, I finally glued on the rain barrel cap holders that the Chef 3D printed for me! I used epoxy after cleaning both surfaces with ethanol.
Paula got solar powered outdoor lights for Christmas and has used them to make the path to the compost visible! Edit: thanks to Mom for inquiring if we can turn the lights out. Yes we can! It’s important not to pollute the dark with more light than we use at any given moment.
I am hoping these tiny seedlings are the annual bluets that sometimes grow in this part of the yard. Keeping an eye on them.
A tinier potential annual bluet seedling next to the comparatively large wild geraniums. These two pictures were 12/31/2022.
12/28/2022, the Ratibida columnifera rosettes survived the big cold!
Two Verbena halei rosettes also exist and made it!
Finally, and very thrilling, two potential Penstemon oklahomensis seedlings! They don’t appear to be hairy leaves like some other common seedling volunteers. Stay tuned.
Shackleton enjoyed a leashed walk in the same excellent 12/28 weather.
Jeanne kindly sent us some Salaginella riddellii- Riddell’s Spike-Moss. We put the biggest chunk in the rainbow garden (in green of course) on 12/25.
We put a smaller piece of the spike moss in the cactus planter.
12/25 was so nice we also moved some volunteers. This is the big root of a poke berry! We moved those along the back fence where another pokeberry lives. We also moved several ampelopsis from random spots in the yard to along the south fence trellis.
A blackjack oak acorn with a sprout on it! We planted this exciting find (12/24) into a pot on 12/25. Fingers crossed for a spring sprout.
Judy gave us an adorable toad house! I have placed it near the veggie beds. Please come eat our earwigs, toad friends.
12/24 checking the pot containing Sedum nutallii from Jeanne. The sedums seem to have made it along with Verbena rosettes (V. Halei??) and other intriguing volunteers.
Going somewhere! Wow!! Happy briar in the car.
On 12/24 we visited the lake at Lexington WMA. This seasonal creek was frozen solid! The lake was too. Briar wears her hunter orange.
After the deep freeze, only the top tips of the recently transplanted rosemary got frozen. They were pressed down by the sheets. But the sheets protected the rest of the plant!
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10-29-2022 fall things continue

We got another package of bare roots from Prairie Moon. One rattlesnake master (since we have one already, maybe they will make seeds), one Camassia angusta- they only had one left), and several Ohio spiderworts.
Up front, the pineapple sage is blooming.
Two slightly different looking seedlings in the Penstemon cobea pot. I’ll keep an eye on them.
Winter greens looking good.
The purple Salvia greggii are really blooming right now.
The showy milkweed seems to be shutting down for the fall with some yellow colors.
I had to use one of the Chef’s big food grade buckets to hold all the fruit from the 17 lb watermelon from a few weeks ago when I cut it open today.