More Signs of Spring!

Despite the freak cold snap we're currently suffering through (the heat's broken in the office, and someone forgot to call facilities to repair it), signs of spring are everywhere.

There are the luscious strawberries.


The gorgeous redbuds.


And, hey, my coral honeysuckle is blooming!


And it's starting to cover my compost!

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.

New House

I haven't written in a while because I've been in the throes of finding a new place to live. This week I'm moving, and next week I will be out of town. So this post will be an oasis in the desert of my temporarily abandoned blog. (Which will make certain of my colleagues, who look at blogging as a competitive sport, very happy. Ahem.)

My new place is a one-bedroom in a duplex. There's a pretty substantial yard with a large camellia bush and a gigantic Southern magnolia. The yard gets a lot more sun than my current place, so growing vegetables will be much easier.

And that means I can finally bring home those pots that have been sitting in the yard at work for about nine months...sorry, everybody. I grew my first veggies at work last year in five-gallon pots (with mixed results). And the pots have been sitting out by the weird blue water pump thing since after all the plants died. I keep meaning to bring them home, but, you know--it rains, or I have somewhere I need to be, or I just got my car cleaned...

As I've mentioned before, I planted some fall vegetable seeds a few weeks ago, but have been kind of neglecting them with all this other stuff going on (although I did finally transplant them to larger pots). And I need to plant more seeds. So that's on the agenda for when I get back from vacation.

The new place needs a compost heap. I also need to figure out the best place in the landscape for all of my plants, since some of them like more sun than others--but if they get too scattered, I will never get around to watering them. Sometimes it really seems that my life is just a struggle between desire and laziness. (Not very Buddhist of me, I know.) We will see which wins this week.

After (and Before) the Rain

It has been raining nearly non-stop for the past week or two. We need the rain after an unusually dry summer--water tables and rivers are low, and of course landscape plants have been suffering.

When there was a brief break in the monsoon today, I went outside to take stock of my poor neglected plants in preparation for fall gardening. I emptied container saucers so the plants wouldn't be in standing water and took some photos while I was at it. Then it rained again.

My roommate has a thing for aloe and spider plants. Here's a shot of the patio behind the back porch. In the middle you can see the two avocado plants she pulled from the compost a few weeks ago.


Here's a close-up of one of them. I am so excited that we might have avocados, if we bring the plants into the house or garage during cold snaps.


I was a little worried about the vegetable seeds I planted a couple of weeks ago. I haven't really checked on them, haven't transplanted them yet, and uh...I left them right under the edge of the house--where all the rain pours off from the roof. I had a good reason for putting them there, but I can't remember what it was now.

When I went to look at them today, I was afraid they'd been washed away. But most of them were actually doing well! (Two of the pots, unbeknownst to me, couldn't drain, so those seeds drowned. Sorry, seeds.) I planted two kinds of lettuce, spinach, kale, broccoli, onions, and radishes. But I can't remember which are which, so I'll just have to see what happens when things get bigger. I still haven't transplanted them into containers--didn't have time this weekend.


Here are two banana plants we've been raising since they were wee little babies. Kate transplanted them a couple of months ago and they exploded since then. These are two more tropical plants, like the avocados, that will be fine if we take care of them when it gets cold. Container gardening makes so much sense for tropical plants in North Florida.

There are lots of other reasons to garden in containers. I can put plants inside or on the porch. I can move them when they need more (or less) light. I don't have to worry about weeding or nematodes. I can experiment with growing more high-maintenance plants without having to do too much. And I can avoid having a planned landscape, which is helpful since I don't like commitment, I rent, and (most importantly) my roommate/landlord likes having grass.

I mostly have natives and herbs in pots. The bulk of my container garden is in the backyard on some shelves I built out of stair risers and closet shelves.


This is a native fern. Just looking at it makes me happy. It's very soft.


One of my salvias has started recovering from my summer neglect. It's my favorite, so I'm pleased. I have a red one, a white one, and a pink one. The pink is so dang cute.


That salvia is great, but it's always trying to infiltrate my other containers. I have to keep an eye on it. And it grows fast! Here are two seedlings in my cyclamen pot. Be gone, intruders! (That's Swedish ivy creeping in from the left. It's kinda yellow from a nitrogen deficiency. Swedish ivy is a pretty groundcover with tiny lavender flowers, and it grows very, very fast. I cut it back frequently.)


My chives, though, is (are?) about the only plant that's truly happy with both me and the weather right now. It's going nuts!


Finally, I checked on the compost. I don't know why everyone doesn't have a compost heap. If you have an out-of-the-way spot in the landscape, compost is very easy to do, and if you do it right, you won't attract varmints. You just have to mix brown stuff with green stuff. I use dirt and dead leaves for the brown, and kitchen scraps for the green. I even compost wet paper towels!

After I took the below picture, I added more dirt (a couple of days overdue). Yes, the compost is another casualty of my summer yard avoidance.

On the left, you can see a Florida avocado plant growing from a pit we threw away. A clove of garlic had also sprouted, and in the middle are a ton of little sproutlings. I'm not sure what they are, but if they push through the soil I added today, I'll probably pull them out and plant them in pots to see what happens.


Compost keeps what we send to the landfill down, our kitchen trash isn't stinky, and we get free seedlings. I don't know what this country will do when we run out of land where we can put landfills--I know I don't want to live next to one. I've read that food waste is 30% or more of the garbage that fills our landfills, so it makes sense to try to keep it out of the trash. (And people who compost can usually pay less in trash pickup fees, by getting a smaller trash can.)

Seattle even recently passed an ordinance to charge all residents for food waste containers--like recycling containers, but for food. They'll pick the containers up each week just like with garbage and recycling. Pretty cool!

Weekend Yard Walk

This weekend my roommate and I did a yard walk. This is when we take our beers and walk around the yard looking at what's growing and what has died since we last remembered to water plants.

The heat and lack of rain over the summer finally got to some of my perennials, like the three different kinds of native salvia I have in pots (though I don't think I've killed them yet), and some of my other potted plants looked pretty gnarly and brown. I snapped off some dead bits and hoped for showy comebacks in a few months. I like low-maintenance plants, obviously.

The larger containers where I put a few different plants seemed to be thriving pretty well, and we still have broccoli, tomato, and strawberry plants from earlier in the year. The raised beds were choked with weeds but we decided to leave them until we plant something. Here's one of our hanging strawberry plants.

Some of the vegetable seeds I planted last weekend had sprouted last week, and I contemplated putting them into the beds or some containers I grew vegetables in earlier this year, but didn't deal with it this weekend after all. More on this when I get around to it.

In the compost heap, which also got neglected this summer--except by the roommate's girlfriend's wiener dog, Raz, who visited it faithfully--an avocado pit had shot up over a foot tall, clearly thriving. Whenever I see things growing in the compost I take them out and put them in pots, but sometimes they look so happy I put it off for a little while.


I'm really glad that fall is finally coming! It's my favorite time of year, and I'm looking forward to gardening again. The summer is just too hot for it.