The window over the driveway gets hit by birds at least once every year. Sometimes these are fatal crashes (as I posted about earlier this year), but usually the birds are unharmed and fly away. These crash survivors are almost always mourning doves.
The big bamboo removal project I started the other day continues. All that's left to do is remove some remaining rhizomes and dig out the hardware cloth that lined the bottom of this planting box.
I spent another hour digging up rhizomes on my bamboo removal project today, but I didn't finish so I'm not ready to post about it. Since it took a lot out of me, I'll just post some quick photos of my yard that I've taken recently.
This is one of the first bamboos I planted, in the spring of 2007. It's "Yellow Groove" bamboo (Phyllostachys aureosulcata) and is doing quite well. It's sizing up nicely, and I expected it to put up 18'-20' tall culms next spring. This weekend I removed it and dismantled the planter box.
I've just spent the day in the garden working on step one of a bamboo project that will take another day at least, and I'm pretty much exhausted. I'll post about that project tomorrow, but today is a day to catch up with a few interesting things I've seen recently.
One of my favorite garden-related things to do is pick out new rocks. Plant-shopping is fun, but rock shopping is just as enjoyable, if not more so. I love rocks! Flagstones, field stones, boulders -- I'm a big fan of them all. (Gravel I'm not such a fan of, but it has its purposes.) Although I'd love to be bringing home some huge, eye-catching boulders to add to the garden, today I'm picking up something on a smaller scale.
Yesterday when I was putting together my "camera on a pole" setup, I grabbed a length of electrical conduit that had been sitting on the driveway for a few weeks. I noticed that there were a lot of small leaves stuck in one of the ends of the tube.
I've had this idea for a while that I want a photographic "map" of my yard. Something like you can get with Google Earth or other satellite map websites, but with more detail. Zoomed way in on my yard. This is obviously something that I need to do myself somehow. Since renting a helicopter is too expensive, hot air balloons are too unpredictable, the high-resolution spy satellites are too classified, and a big bunch of helium party balloons is too risky (for my camera), I decided to try mounting my camera on a long pole.
As I mentioned yesterday, one of the reasons that I visited Needmore Bamboo in Indiana was to purchase a large potted bamboo that Brad was holding for me. The great thing about large bamboos in pots is that they provide immediate impact -- there's no waiting for a few years.
This past weekend I took a trip to Needmore Indiana (near Bloomington) to visit Needmore Bamboo Company. I've visited this nursery at least once a summer for the previous three years, but this visit would be a little different as Brad had arranged a "Bamboo Celebration Day", and there would be several other bamboo lovers attending.
The veggie garden is just about done for the year, and it looks a lot different than it did a couple of months ago. Overall I'd have to say that my harvest was a disappointment: too few tomatoes, cantaloupe that weren't as flavorful as I had hoped, beets that didn't do well.
A day or so after it rains, this orange rubbery fungus emerges from a log back in my woodpile. It's happened every time it's rained this summer.
I was taking early morning photos of mushrooms the other day with my little camera. Its tiny size makes it perfect for mushroom photos, because I like to set it to macro mode then get the camera as low as possible to see the mushrooms from underneath. Makes it look like I'm one of the small critters that normally sees mushrooms as the towering "trees" of the jungle that is the lawn.
One of the first flowering plants that I put into my garden, probably around 2002, was Salvia coccinea or "Scarlet Sage". I'm not sure what attracted me to it, but it was probably the brilliant red flowers.
One of the best things about my garden this year is the hyacinth bean vines. I've only been growing these for a couple of years -- I think last summer was the first time I planted them -- but they've become my favorite flowering vine. I am especially pleased with the one that I planted along one of my deck supports. After a slow start and a few nibbles by deer, it's really going strong and is covering the deck railing.
It's that time of year when that unassuming green vine that's been growing over your shrubs, mailbox, or trellis really puts on a show and explodes with small white flowers.
When I was a child I watched every low-budget sci-fi movie that was broadcast. I seem to remember Saturday afternoons being the regular timeslot for these movies, but I could be wrong about that. Rockets, invading alien creatures, strange discoveries in the sea or some deep cave, giant monsters attacking Tokyo and each other -- I loved them all. I'm sure I've forgotten dozens of horrible plots, but there are a few that have stuck with me. One in particular comes back to me every so often while working in the garden. It involved something about a shipwreck, an island full of giant mushroom people, and how eating the only source of food on the island -- mushrooms -- would turn you into one of these mushroom zombies.
Yesterday I did a little project in the garden. It wasn't particularly fun, and would have been quite boring, so I didn't document the entire project. I would like to show you the results though. I'd also like to show a couple of other little projects from the last few months that I never got around to posting about.
The last two nights we've had some good, hard rains in St. Louis. By my measurements it's been about 2 1/2 inches total, which is a very nice soaking for two days. The nice thing about storms that pass through in the night is that the garden gets watered, but the day can still be nice and sunny and dry.
Lepidoptera is the order of insects including moths and butterflies. Today I have a few more specimens to show you. First up is this insect that really looks like a beetle of some sort, with its long tubular body.
This is my wildflower and annuals bed. Although it was fresh and beautiful earlier this year and should still be looking pretty good now, the heatwave we had in the middle of the summer really took a lot out of it. This is how it should look in a month, not right now.
Yesterday I posted about taking several small divisions of bamboo and potting them up. Today it's one division of bamboo only, but it's a large one. It's about the biggest that I can handle myself, and it came from my friend Michael's garden.
The first of my projects this past weekend was to dig some small divisions from one of my in-ground bamboos: Phyllostachys glauca 'Yunzhu'. I've written about large bamboo divisions I've dug before, mainly from my friend Michael's garden, but today will be a little different. Instead of taking huge chunks of a mature bamboo, I'll be taking pretty small culms but trying to get as long a rhizome with them as possible.
One of the best late-season bloomers in my garden has always been Caryopteris, or "Blue Mist Spirea". I planted it five or six years ago, probably as an impulse buy during a trip to the nursery around this time of year.
I've been keeping an eye on the butterflies moving through the yard, in the hopes of seeing something unique, or not as common. I'm grateful for every butterfly that appears, but there are some that are more exciting than others. Not that anything in my yard is very rare, but if it's not something I regularly see (or some species I haven't been seeing for weeks already), I grab the camera!
As I promised, to help balance out all of the "creepy" posts about insects and spiders I've been doing lately, here's a look at some of the late summer flowers that are in bloom in my garden. It's really important to make sure you have plants that make the end of summer and start of autumn interesting. Although it's great having flowers all over the place in May and June, it's also pretty easy as most plants seem to want to bloom then. It's a little trickier to ensure you're looking at blooms now (in early September), but it's really worth the effort.
I haven't been out in the yard taking photos the last few days, and I'm not sure of the reason. Yes, it's been cloudy and wet recently, but today it was clear, cool, and beautiful -- so weather isn't the excuse. I guess I just wasn't in the mood. Unfortunately that leaves me with nothing to talk about in this post... or so I thought. As I went outside to mow the lawn this evening, I noticed this "bug" was still in the same spot that I had seen it earlier in the day, and yesterday too if I remember right.
Summers in St. Louis usually bring a dozen good, strong thunderstorms or more. Strong winds, thunder, lots of lightning, and dramatic, cool clouds. This summer has been really quiet. There was that one big storm a while back, but that's about it. I was actually thinking about using some photos from last summer's storms in a post, but then things changed.
I've made a couple of interesting discoveries lately. One is a nice one, and the other is not so nice. I'll start with the nice one: my black stem taro (Elephant Ears) is flowering! I didn't even know they produced flowers, but there it is.
Yesterday I wrote about the planter box I helped a friend build for his bamboo. We didn't quite finish, so today we'll finish the box and plant the bamboo.
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