More Leaf Veins

The red and yellow maple leaves are actually my favorite. The colors just pop so well.

Cinder Block Plant Pots

I got this idea while browsing at a bookstore in this book Garden Anywhere. They were highlighting growing hens and chicks in bricks with holes in them. I dug some smaller cinder blocks out of the basement and transplanted my much abused sedums into them. I put the cinder blocks on a piece of plywood so I can move them around since I didn't figure out how to deal with the hole going all the way through. The sedums have been growing in a pile on the top of a rock in the rock wall. They were sitting somewhere you can't see and got next to no care. They already look MUCH happier.

Time to Plant the Bulbs

The mosquitoes are vicious this year. I've only planted half the bulbs I've bought, and I only got about two dozen. Every time I go out even with bug spray I get eaten alive.

Adult Mantis

Well I've seen my adult mantis, just one day earlier then last year. My guess is female based on size and belly segments, but you never know. Just to be contrary this one was brown where last years was green.

Leaf Veins

It's almost that time of year again. I'm getting ready for all the leaves to change color and start teasing me with patterns.

Bridge Again

I love this bridge, though I expect I might enjoy any bridge that was so photogenic.

Pink Ant

I do enjoy the critters that insist on being photographed. This ant insisted on hanging out on the best looking flower.

Cransbill I think?

You would think with the number of times I photograph this plant I'd bother snapping a pic of the label.

Pink Fireworks Flower

I don't remember the full name of this one, just the word Fireworks. It was certainly an apt name.

Purple Passionflower

What's not to like about furry alien looking flowers.

New Plant Table

Months ago when I thought I was moving I downsized my plant collection substantially. I went down to 5 potted indoor plants. My outdoor plants were all planted out and I was ready to move. Things change, and I've been slowly accumulating more houseplants again. I had a small set of lights under a kitchen cabinet, but that space was painfully full (trying to raise ferns from spores again). Now I'm in the process of reviving / rehabilitating some african violets for my aunt and needed some more space.

For $1.00 in new lumber I made the table above. I cheated in that I already had the lights and the table itself, I just needed to devise a way to put the two together. Two clearance 4 foot pieces of 2 x 4 solved that problem. It's 4 feet wide, 2 feet front to back, and 2 feet tall. I really wanted a multilevel plant shelf, but this will have to do. I can add a third or even a fourth set of lights for spring when I'm planning on starting massive numbers of veggies inside again (I should be able to fit 4 flats). Too bad it's already full :P.

Lotus Seedhead

For my birthday I visited the New York Botanical Garden again. This was the first time I realized that the pond outside one of the wings of the conservatory was actually one of two ponds. This time I saw the lotus and tropical water lily pond, not just the hardy water lily one.

New York - George Washington Bridge

Every few weeks I go to New York with my cousins to stay with my aunt. She has an amazing view from her apartment so I always take some time to appreciate the view.

Forgotten Photo - Darner

I see darner dragonflies at eye level very rarely. To give you an idea, this is the first one I saw back in 2007. I've seen 4 perched low enough to photograph since then. They often perch quite high in trees so I'm always impressed when someone shows a photo of one. This is still one of my favorite pictures from my old camera.

Lost Photo : Dragonfly in North Dakota

Relying on memory to remind you of what pictures have been taken gets wonky after 50,000 images. The above is one of dozens of dragonfly photos I took while in North Dakota but never tagged with anything. Unless I went looking in the folder I'd never see them. My next project will be going through and deleting the not quite focused images. I try to delete the wildly out of focus ones right away, but in looking back I've missed even that sometimes.

Max

I'm finally as done as I'm going to get with tagging. I did discover quite a few lost photos as well. Above is Max the cockatiel. We're coming up on 8 years living together now. I generally avoid taking photos of birds. Well, that's a lie. I have plenty of pictures of feathered dots flying away, or tiny birds sitting hundreds of feet away (as I discovered while tagging photos). I need a better zoom lens and some sneaking skills before I get good at wild bird photography. For the moment Max will have to suffice.

Bearded Iris Propagation

I have tons of plants to move, but until Spring moving them is not really a great idea. Some things, such as my bearded iris however are not moving, so I can feel better about messing with them. I was too lazy earlier in the summer to dig up the clumps and chop them up. I finally got to it this weekend. I had only two of the four plants bloom this year so expected them to be crowded. Some of the roots were 12 inches across packed tightly together. no wonder there were no flowers. I split and re spaced everything and they look okay. I figured if I can buy roots in the bulb sections now, it can't be that bad of a time to split. Hope they will be fine. I doubled their space.

My new garden plan is leaving me with tons of plants to move, including a few I've been waiting years to get to blooming size. I have one peony, that has just reached a size I expect flowers next year, and they hate being moved... I also have to completely redo the pond and figure out how deep I need it for water lilies to overwinter.

Meadowhawk

Close-up of yesterday's dragonfly. They look so much bigger zoomed in.

Cold Dragonflies

One fun part about Fall arriving is the leftover dragonflies. They need to be warm to fly, so perch for longer periods of time. The red meadowhawk types are quite willing to transfer to a hand. Sadly I also spotted a black saddlebags yesterday but had no camera on hand. Back to dragging my camera everywhere.

I'm about 90% done with tagging my photos. I found all my Mass Audubon images from 2009 never got tagged and am finding all sorts of critters I barely remember seeing in them.

Photo Cataloguing

I'm trying to spend this week going through ALL of my photos tagging and labeling so nothing goes missing, such as the above picture from 2009. It had no tags, so finding it would have been chance alone.

Bulb Time

It's bulb time in my area. Meaning it isn't quite time to plant, but it is time to get them from stores so they won't suffer the sometimes abysmal storage big box stores put them through (outside or in the rain). For things like bearded irises it is time to plant, at least in the northeast US. So far I'm trying to control myself. I got some hyacinth as someone gifted a blooming trio last year and they smell divine (I planted them out in the yard after they finished blooming), so in case those ones don't re bloom I bought 6 more to plant. I also found one species tulip, and a black tulip. Tulips seem hit or miss here, so I'm going to try them in different places. I've seen species tulips come back year after year at Tower Hill, so I'm pretty sure they come back better then the hybrids. I may also talk myself into a bag of something to try to force.

Termites Suck, er chew...

So last week sometime I discovered our shed is getting eaten from the ground up by termites. (That certainly explains why it seems to be sinking.) That find led me to wander about the yard to see what else might be getting eaten. They've munched half the bottom row of the pond timbers. The actual garden beds seem to be fine, but they do all have pretty bad wood rot. (Which happens when you build out of cheap pine rather then rot resistant wood.) I have one raised bed to replace completely and others to phase out. The deep one near the house is getting demolished to keep any termites from getting ideas. The shorter ones near the house I'm not sure what I'm doing with yet. Since I now have to rip up and move or replace most of the beds in the yard my eye turned toward reorganizing. The current design was caused by fencing the yard in sections rather then connecting it all together.

My new plan:

This is only a plan of the currently fenced garden area I have to work with. A large chunk of the yard off to the right and above this plot is devoted to the dogs with very little except wood chips. Some of this depends on whether we can get the huge trees thinned that now shadow the yard. My mother is on a local food kick right now and devoting more space to food and getting some light into the garden can let us actually grow some stuff I might eat too. I really want to do more grapes (our reliance vine gave us grapes this year, which were okay, but I really want green table grapes) and cantaloupe melons. Mom really likes tomatoes, lettuce and watermelons. Right now we can sort of grow lettuce, green beans, peas and a few other veggies, but not well. We had two years of great tomatoes a few years back when the trees have been limbed up. I'm hoping at minimum to have them trimmed, the one closest the house seems to be dying however and may be completely removed.

Obviously the above plan would be more useful to other people if they had the current layout. I'm actually quite embarrassed by what it looks like now, so just believe me that it would be a better use of the space I have. I have tall plants growing south of short plants, lots of stuff is sort of on top of other stuff, and I let the weeds take over in a few sections.

Egg Case

I found this last week on a banana I got from a local grocery store. The sticker on the banana said Columbia and I spent a little time trying to figure out what it was but had no luck. I then had a weird dream where it hatched into weird moth bee hybrid things that I had to keep from escaping. it's sitting in a tupperware container while I decide what to do with it. I expect it went through some nasty fumigation so likely is dead, but better safe then sorry.