New Look to Our Front Yard

Okay, an immediate apology to followers who have been posting photos of snow in their yards. We are now 98% finished with the new look in the front yard with the intent to do two things. The first was to completely clear out the weeds that were truly out of control. The second was to have a cleaner look that also requires less maintenance. For those that live either here or in another climate where tropical plants thrive, you know that we have super weeds. The same environment that allows orchids to bloom lets weeds shoot up quickly and take hold. If you are the least bit inattentive, you have a mess on your hands pretty quickly. Then, fs as we had done, you have other plantings close together, it becomes that much more difficult to get at the weeds. Our new plan takes those factors into account and hopefully, we will now be able to snatch (or spray) those pesky weeds soon after they poke their heads through the mulch. As for our palms, it’s hard to say. Three palms in each front yard was what the developers put in as part of the initial landscaping and a lot of the neighbors have lost their palms over the past few years. We’ll see what happens with ours.

When I wanted one more plant for the front, I was going to maybe get a ground orchid or a bromeliad, and then this different type of succulent caught my eye. I accidentally threw away the tag, so I don’t know what the variety is, but I thought it would work nicely with the aloe vera we had planted. The leaves have a pinkish hue to them.

New Plant – Don’t Know the Variety

 Through a somewhat odd set of circumstances, I have become involved with a local cultural program where we are having very small venue (for now) free performances of different types of music, usually in an outdoor setting where optional dining is available. So far. we’ve done Jazz, Blues, Baroque is coming up (indoors for that one), then Blue Grass in the fall. Let me be the first to say that my musical knowledge is limited – I couldn’t pick out a Delta Blues song from a Chicago Blues except by accident. I can rattle off several composers names, but play me an excerpt and unless it’s one of the really famous pieces, I won’t recognize it. I’m not sure how much of a range I have, although I do enjoy classical in the right setting, rock, blues, country and western, jazz, folk, New Age, Celtic, reggae and whatever category music such as Native-American falls into in short bursts. To me, heavy metal sounds like garbage cans being clashed together and I wouldn’t mind if rap and hip-hop disappeared. If Electronica is actually a type that can go away, too.

My point here though is that people do have vastly different tastes in music, some quite passionately so. A friend of mine continues to astound me with his depth of knowledge of classical considering that he is not in academia. What is it then, that draws us to a certain type of music?

Small Business Saturday is a wonderful effort that has taken off, initially thanks to American Express (hardly what one would call a small business), and now because it has gained a momentum of its own. I would like to suggest, however, that supporting a little or lesser known author is another way to share in Small Business Saturday. Those of us in that category don’t have storefronts, but we are most assuredly in the marketplace. There are a number of sources such as the Independent Author Network at http://www.independentauthornetwork.com/ or lesser known authors may also be the subject of pins on Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/) or mentioned on Shelfari (http://www.shelfari.com/). If you have a Kindle, check out the lower priced books because despite the on-going discussions within the author community of whether they should or not, a lot of independents keep the price on their e-books low as a way of introducing themselves. You can skip past the names you recognize and spend some time perusing titles that intrigue you by authors that you aren’t familiar with yet. In all fairness, I am the first to admit that all self-published and small press authors are not created equal and the fact that someone has written a book with a cool title and good “back cover description” doesn’t mean that you will like the book. (On the other hand, haven’t you also been disappointed with best sellers that you didn’t care for?) A feature such as Amazon’s “Look Inside” is nice since you do have a chance to read more than a few lines to see if you at least like the style of writing.

At any rate, even if you don’t necessarily decide to explore more indie authors today – if you’re inspired by doing so on Small Business Saturday – that counts!

Red hibiscus after being dramatically cut back

Sentimentality alert! First though, my apologies for not having posted for the past few days. It has been particularly hectic with a number of commitments that required more effort than I had anticipated. Ah well, we all underestimate tasks at times. With that said – I want to talk about the red hibiscus in the photo. If you’ve been following the blog, you know we have had a considerable amount of work done in our back yard. If you are new to the blog – welcome – and we allowed the back yard to get rather out of control and brought in a landscape designer to correct it. One of the mistakes we made was with the red hibiscus that we have. When we first moved into this house, my best friend who lived next door gave us the red hibiscus in the standard three-gallon plastic pot as a house-warming present. Since we intended to put the pool and hot tub in and have our tropical paradise in back, we decided to leave the hibiscus in that container until the pool was finished. Well, that was before we knew of all the delays we were going to encounter. The poor hibiscus lingered, somewhat neglected and became rather scraggly. By the time we transplanted it into a beautiful large ceramic pot, we were concerned that perhaps we’d neglected it too much. However, it took to its new home and flourished.

In fact, what we didn’t know was that when you plant something like a hibiscus in a container, it’s important to move it around periodically because otherwise, the main root will find that hole in the container and grow through it into the ground. Now, we did notice that the magnificently flowering shrub was getting quite large and our second mistake was in not trimming it back. Then, sadly, my dear friend passed away at much too young an age as the cancer she had once beat came back with a vengeance. For me, the now thriving hibiscus was a symbol of the friendship we had enjoyed for too brief a time. I asked our regular lawn care guys to transplant it into the yard and that was when we discovered that the root was so firmly attached that if we attempted to transplant, it would likely destroy the hibiscus as well as the pot.

Okay, so when we brought in the landscape designer, I explained the situation and she said she had a potential solution, although she couldn’t guarantee that it would work. She cut the hibiscus back to practically nothing and said that if it grew back, as she though it would, to just keep it trimmed to a manageable level. The blossom in the photo is the first since “the surgery” and there are some more buds. We shall see if this works, but it does look promising.

Hibiscus in full bloom

As you may can tell, my schedule has not yet stabilized, but I really am hoping to get back on track by the end of this week. The Bea Peskoe Lunchtime Lecture Series that is an integral part of the Homestead Center for the Arts organization, always lines up interesting lectures and the one on Monday was no exception. (http://www.homesteadcenterforthearts.com)

It was a great presentation by one of the County Extension Agents held at their facility in the Redland. The topics were vegetable gardening in raised beds and containers and pests – all specific to our unique environment. The raised bed and container aspects are because trying to dig in this soil is incredibly difficult unless one does it commercially with industrial-strength equipment. Now, as I have mentioned before, plants are not particularly safe around me, however, getting better with them has been a goal of mine for some time. Since we are making changes in our backyard – another update on that soon – the time has come for me to get serious about plants. Well, not nearly as serious as some people, but able to at least maintain the yard after having brought in a professional landscaper to recover it. Anyway, the vegetable part of the yard is limited and mostly my husband’s domain, but much of what the lecturer said was applicable to other plants as well – especially when discussing pests. Thanks to a great lecture, I am really inspired and focused on increasing my ability to manage plants.