I spent some time digging more elephant ears and cannas yesterday just before dark. I left some cannas in the ground as an experiment, and thought I would remove half or so of one large planting.
Because it's been so mild, there has not been any urgency in digging up the tropicals. Yes I dug and brought into the garage some of the papyrus (Cyperus papyrus) and the upright elephant ears (Alocasia macrorrhiza) quite a while ago, but the plants with tubers or rhizomes I've not worried about. Elephant Ears (Colocasia esculenta and others) and various cannas have been fine out there -- the ground has not yet frozen.
Eleven inches (28cm) of rain this month in St. Louis (officially), with at least 9" (23cm) of it coming in the last four days. What follows heavy rains in late December?
So much of the country is having a bad time with extreme weather, it seems wrong to complain about our own weather here in St. Louis. No blizzards, tornadoes, or anything else violent, but we have been getting more than our fair share of rain.
The other day after cutting down the bananas and preparing them for winter I decided it was also time to remove the pond netting.
My Wednesday Vignette this week is a question...
Sunny winter days are when I really appreciate the bamboo in the garden the most.
Although temperatures still don't have me concerned -- it's just been so mild, just barely getting below freezing a few nights -- I figured that it was time to get the Musa basjoo banana ready for winter.
Not much going on around here recently, so I thought I'd take a look back to a time before I had this blog, to a place that I'd much like to visit again: Kauai
Why does it seem like I've been doing the "random" posts more often lately? Probably for two reasons: the first being that I've not been doing much in the garden lately of course, so there's not much to post about out there.
The other day I did some pruning of the terrarium succulents, leaving me with lots of propagation material.
One benefit of having to bring so many non-hardy plants indoors for the winter is that I get to look at them a lot more than I did when they were out in the garden. One plant that I'm looking at a lot (and loving what I see) is the totem pole cactus (Lophocereus schottii f. monstrosus).
This is one of the times of the year when the invasion is most apparent here in Missouri, at least in the St. Louis area.
It's time again for my annual (or biannual?) terrarium refresh, where I do some pruning, digging, planting. I have to warn you, the images in today's post won't be so pretty.
Anna at Flutter and Hum hosts the Wednesday Vignette meme, and today's vignette is a scent. For whatever reason the last few nights we've been out later than normal, and entering the house each night gives me quite a shock.
Today is at least partly sunny, with temperatures reaching about 15ºF above normal.
Like many gardeners, I buy a lot of seeds -- especially in the mid-to-late winter months, when seed catalogs hint at the excitement that next season's plants will bring. The problem is, I rarely use more than a few seeds from any packet each season -- maybe half a packet in a crazy year.
One of the pre-winter tasks that I did get done is bringing the potted succulents indoors. Because of some furniture rearrangement since last winter, there's not the room for these upstairs that there was before.
I realized something this morning when looking out the bedroom window over the garden.
It's been a while since we've seen the sun in the morning. It seems like it rained for at least five days straight, and has been overcast and grey. Yesterday afternoon was nice and sunny though, in that wintery way.
Time for more random observations.
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