Spring Plumeria

The plumeria is bouncing back as you can tell.  The lone leaf is still there but it now has 4 more to keep it company.

These plants really are good at being dormant.  You can see the dark bottom of the plant where it was when it was bought last year.  Then the tannish area above it where it grew last summer/fall.  Now the green area on top is the new growth since it came to the office.

I should probably bring it back outside so it can take full advantage of the spring / summer sun.

One of our friends used to have over a dozen of these in pots and she'd take them out of storage every year to have them grow more.  Some were over 5 feet tall.

A coworker at the office confuses the chocolate tree with coffee.  I can see the confusion, although they don't look anything alike.  Would be neat to have a coffee plant also though.  They're spindly compared to the trunk a cacao tree will eventually have but who wouldn't like to have a little home grown coffee?

What plants do you currently have growing  in your garden/pots?  What would you like to be growing?  Do you have a plant wish list?

Wallapini Gardening

 

Recently my wife sent me a text about a sunken greenhouse.  This looks like a good idea especially since the HOA's main concern is that things don't stick up over the fence line and make the neighborhood look bad from the street.  This would make the greenhouse significantly lower and in turn make the HOA happy.

On the down side though there are some factors that may make this less ideal.  I looked up some information on what goes into making one of these and came across a site specifically on helping people decide if this was the way to go for them.

First off you need to consider the land.  North Central Texas land in general has a lot of clay which makes an issue for drainage of this kind of structure.  The solution they propose for clay is to put in French drains to get the water out.  This could work if the drain had somewhere to go.  Our lot is pretty flat and thus doesn't have anywhere to go really.  I'd have to run a pipe all the way around the house to drain out the front near the sidewalk and that would be to the lowest point inside the greenhouse.  That point is not the floor level but below the cold sink which is needed to regulate the cold air inside the greenhouse.  Apparently within a greenhouse (supposedly warm) there is often a cold air that sinks to the lowest point and can possibly keep your plants too cold if they are the lowest point.

Second concern I though of was what to do with all the dirt that has to be dug out.  Where do you put it?  The site assumes you have a bit of land and are able to choose an appropriate location.  Pretty limited here but some of the dirt can go into planters after construction.  Again clay, so not ideal.  A possible idea that just came to mind, make bricks.  Not sure if it's the right clay but I haven't dug down to see.  Another idea is to use the excavated material to berm up around the outside.  This would make the insulation twice as tall as what was dug out.  More building a hill around the greenhouse for insulation.

Third, it's labor intensive to build.  To do this properly and not give up in the middle I'd need help making it.  Friends would probably help some but in the end it probably means hiring some help to finish it.  Also renting a truck and possibly equipment to dig and haul stuff.  Gardening is not for the lazy.  It takes time to do a lot of it and persistence to keep it going.

There are many more concerns than this when deciding to build but these are some of the first thoughts after reading a page on Wallapinis.

Sean’s First Snow

This is the first time our cats have seen snow.  They were born in the winter but there wasn't much snow to speak of last year.

This year we got 3-4 inches of snow at one time.  Nearly a week later we were still seeing snow in super shady spots along roads and by buildings even though the temperatures reached well above freezing.

Some of the flakes we saw were well the size of half dollars.  For those of you who might not realize money comes in a hard form, and not just your parent's plastic, that would be about two and a half fingers wide.

This picture was taken at the start of the snow fall.  As you can see, the houses in the background are just starting to get some snow accumulation on top of their roofs.

That corner you see would be a good spot to put a garden shed, leaving a 5 foot walking area around the side and back for maintenance and mowing.  Five feet is about as narrow as you usually would leave a mow strip so that it can both be accessed and be able to have enough light to actually grow grass between a shed and the fence.

Maintenance room is one of those things I really hadn't thought much about when laying out our first house backyard.  But then again it already had a shed that was hard to get around.  The previous owners had put it caddy corner to the lot footprint and the north corner was a mere two feet and way too shaded to grow anything but saplings which were a huge problem for most of the time we lived there.  I should have taken a week or more off just to clean up the backyard but so many thing take up time we never got around to it.

This time we're master planning the yard so that we can make the most of it.  The fig tree is a prime example being several feet from the fence to give it adequate room to spread out.  Fig trees in our area can get pretty big pretty fast and I'm hoping to train it well so we can get plenty of figs in the coming years.  This snow should help it acclimate well.  I checked it after the thaw and the branches still looked amazing.  So many things we've learned since then and we're going to be implementing a lot of new things going forward.

Dew on a Spider Web

This is one of those little things you don't think about when you move into a more densely populated area.  I woke up one morning to see this lovely spiderweb covered in dew.  

We're living in an area surrounded by a lake now so the humidity is pretty high up there most days and the cooler weather means we're getting nice foggy mornings where things like this are more common.

The other thing I didn't realize I had been missing for so long was the sound of nature.  We're about 1,500 feet from the water's edge and only about 600 feet from the tree line where it's protected by the US Army Corps of Engineers.  This means there will be NO development in that direction.  I have never in my 25 years working with civil engineers come across a situation where this would ever change. So I'm pretty sure the sound of nature will be there as long as we are.  This unfortunately also means mosquitos but that's a small price to pay for being able to sit outside on the back porch and listen to the sounds of night.

We still haven't gotten around to doing much with the backyard but we're thinking really hard about it.  We finally got the garage to about 90% complete with storage and shelves.  We could actually park a car in there if we wanted to.  I think that's a first for us.  Our first house had a pool table in the garage from about 3 months in so we never really parked in there.

We do still plan to purchase bicycles so we can get out and about in the neighborhood and get some exercise in but there are so many other things we need to get still that that's on the back burner for now.

What do you enjoy about being near nature?