Rain Lily Explosion

After many dry weeks, it started raining again. Hallelujah! One of the first storms yielded hundreds of rain lilies in my backyard.

Yard Update

I've been neglecting my gardening lately. But the landscape carries on without me.

The rain lily I photographed last week died, but a new one sprouted right next to it.


This is the time of year for spiderwort, another "weed" that I like.


And it's everywhere! Dotting the yard and thriving at the edge of the vacant wooded lot behind my backyard.


The camellia bush lost all its blooms in the past few weeks.

What's Growing around My House, Pt. 2

When I moved into my house a couple of months ago, I started a compost pile. Since then I keep waiting for something I discard to sprout, 'cuz when the compost sprouts, I get free plants.

It's easier--and cheaper--to try to grow new things this way, rather than go to the store and pick some plants out. At the old house, I got all kinds of seedlings, some more successful than others. But I've been sorely disappointed at the new house, as my compost has remained singularly barren.

So I watered the compost, and I added more leaves, and I stirred it up, and I waited patiently. Finally, the other day I went to dump my food scraps and voila! Some seedlings had emerged. But I didn't recognize what they were. My compost had never sprouted such plants before!

I carefully dug out one of the plants and looked at its origins. A kernel of corn! Exciting. One of these days I may pull up all of these seedlings and put them in pots. Until then, I just admire them as I dump my scraps.


One of my uncles gave me this ivy plant over the holidays. He had a bunch of them hanging from the pergola on his patio in Ft. Myers. There was some story about some teachers he bought them for...I don't know. Anyway, he had a bunch and offered me one. I loaded the thing--it has vines at least six feet long--into my hatchback and went to St. Pete for a few days. When I drove home, the cooking I had subjected it to in the hatch didn't seem to have affected it.

So naturally I concluded the thing it was invincible (I do test my plants awfully, I know), so I brought the ivy into my bedroom. I was super stoked because it's my first bedroom plant. Imagine--a plant in your bedroom! I never had imagined that, so when it finally occurred to me it blew my mind. I stared at it lovingly every day.

The only problem is that my bedroom is like a cave. It's some shade of dark 24/7 and always kind of cool. I put the plant up and forgot about it for a couple of weeks. Then I started noticing it was shedding a lot of brown leaves. I took it down and realized that the wall-facing side was dying. So I put it in the ICU, i.e., the backyard. I've been leaving it there to soak up some sun and rain, and hopefully it will pull through.

I do like having a bedroom plant. Maybe when I bring it back in, I'll rotate it more frequently so all the sides can suffer equally. "Nobody puts Baby in the corner!"


My Florida violets are thriving, although one much more visibly so than the other--don't ask me why, since they get the same amount of light and water. This native plant is sadly considered a weed in most people's landscapes. But I love it--my favorite plants seem to be considered weeds by most people--and am looking forward to the delicate blooms in later spring.

Yard Round-up

I got some yardwork done this week, finally. The new place is shaping up nicely.

The first thing I did was create a compost heap. I didn't ask my landlady about this, but the nice thing about a composter is that it can always be removed later with little to no impact on the yard. Of course, my ideal would be that it stay after I leave, with the next resident continuing to compost. Then again, right now I don't ever want to move again, so that might not come to pass.

I got the composter--basically a roll of chicken wire-type stuff--from the Alachua County Waste Management office:

They don't advertise it, but they give these things away for free. I only called them because I knew that many cities have similar programs. They also give away free air-tight compost buckets for the kitchen, and they sell these other compost bins for $30. I'm on the waiting list for one of those, but I don't know if I'll get one when they come in. I don't use my compost for garden fertilizer, so I don't really need a high-tech system. It's just a way for me to reduce waste, and sometimes get free plants.

It's lined with cardboard to keep heat and moisture in, and to reduce the chance that raccoons will get into it when I forget to stir it up. (Properly maintained compost should not stink or attract pests.) I know it looks ugly, so I planted my new passion flower and a native honeysuckle vine up against it. The hope is that the compost will feed the plants and they'll vine up all prettily onto the wire, thus concealing the cardboard from sight.

There are admittedly some flaws in this plan, however: 1) I may have waited too long to transplant the honeysuckle from the pot where I placed it this spring--and it's not looking so hot right now--and 2) passion flower dies back in the winter. Well, call it an experiment.

Yesterday my duplex-mate and I built a massive fire pit:

The thing is about four feet across and represents some serious sweat equity on both of our parts (my back is killing me today). Don't ask me where my neighbor got the cement, because it may be borderline misdemeanor-y. We created a pile of dirt that was mind-boggling. Our lot seems to stretch back another half-acre or so. There's grass, and then there's a line at which a weedy, forested wilderness begins. So we threw the dirt back there.

I don't know about anywhere else, but in Gainesville, people go nuts for backyard fires in the fall. So that's pretty exciting.

We also scavenged some wood:

This morning I took some photos of some other aspects of my landscape. Here is my sad little collection of vegetables (and strawberries):

You can see I have a bowl of seed packets there waiting, nay, begging, to be planted. It's been a busy fall, so I'm trying to give myself a break and not get too upset about being a lame-o slacker veggie gardener this season. There's always spring, summer, and next fall to grow vegetables.

I'm still trying to figure out what the light's like in my yard. The recent time change didn't help my observations. So right now I have most of my plants edging my driveway:

I try to look at them every day to see if any look like they're suffering from too much exposure to sun. I have a few more lining the pathway to the back door:

I also placed a few plants on my old rickety plant stand under the magnolia tree:

Those are the shadelovers, and I'm banking that that area is pretty shady. But it's hard to tell. (When did I get so many plants?)

The only other thing I'd like to point out about my landscape is these horrid shrubs that edge the back and sides of the house. I really, really, really don't like these plants. I think they're ugly and they make getting to the hose annoying. (I have to say that I'm not a shrub person in general.) I'm going to ask my landlady if I can rip these particular ones out and make a flower bed. I've actually never had a flower bed before, so I'm kind of excited about the possibilities. (It would help if I knew how much light that area gets.)

That's about all that's going on in the landscape right now. Oh, wait--I did plant those winter annuals (dianthus, snapdragon, pansy, etc.), but forgot to take photos of the pots.