Showing posts with label photos garden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photos garden. Show all posts

Monday, March 7, 2011

Our Paradise . . . past photos and some inspiration



The gardening season has arrived in Florida and The Captain and I are still cleaning up, making plans and repotting plants for the new garden.  

We plan on making our own pavers out of concrete and painting them as I have done in the past . . . although the paths are still there from the past garden design, there are many areas of the garden that have not been paved and we are planning many little paved patio areas.

Here are photos of our Paradise in the past, before freezing winters killed most everything and neglect took over . . . it was like a lush tropical resort . . . but we are planning bigger and better things for our Paradise this year.  

The Captain has finished the fence and the property is now completely private!  What a great start to the new season and the new Paradise :)


Our Paradise Past




I've been getting design inspiration from so many gardeners in Bloggerville.  Kathleen's garden is one of them.    I love the lushness of the plantings she has selected for the backdrop and the deck portion is so inviting.  To see more of her garden, click here.  

Kathleen's Garden















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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Calissia fragrans . . . thriving in my Paradise




This is an older post from another blog
 that I am currently restructuring.

The calissia fragrans are still thriving, although the
unusually cold winter knocked them down a bit this year.

I'm currently propagating them from runners and cuttings
in containers and will start another "farm" in the ground.
I love these plants!!







They are multiplying and blooming for the first time . . .
they must love acid since I have been feeding them coffee.








Calissia fragrans is an unusual and tropical semi-epiphyte (grows mainly in trees, but will root in soil). Individual leaf rosettes may be 8" wide at the center stalk. Snaking out from the stalk are runners that trail as much as several feet to find a new place to root. Fragrant white globular flowers on upright spikes bloom in summer, then fade and lose their fragrance, then perk up and become fragrant again on and on.

Flowering or not, it is a spectacular plant that would look awesome hanging from a tree in a shady spot in the greenhouse or in a hanging basket as a houseplant. I plan on lining my carport jungle with hand painted hanging containers loaded with these gorgeous plants.







This is where the plants in the carport jungle began . . . I cleared out a few of these plants that were growing in the pathway and placed them in this container that I use to start plants or experiment with my propagation projects.

At the moment, I am experimenting with the calissia fragrans in my carport jungle, planting the runners into individual containers. I've been doing this for several months and those babies are already putting out their own runners. I left the runners intact in this container and they are growing another rosette. How cool is that? You can see some of the runners in the above photo.

I have a few spots in the yard where I planted a few here and there and now have my "farm" of mass plantings. Hopefully, they will be one of the plants to start my mail order plant business.

It all started about 7 years ago when I had a gardening group on MSN and made some local gardening friends that I swapped plants with. These came from Sally in St. Petersburg . . . she is very much into native plants and I have some other plants I got from her that are still thriving through neglect. There is something to be said about native plants!

All my container plants in the carport jungle have been getting a regular dose of watered down coffee and water that I boiled vegetables in (without salt) . . . the calissia fragrans are especially responding successfully and I have never seen them looking so healthy and big. Keep in mind that I have not used commercial fertilizer on them at all.

These are my new perfect plant . . . as you can see from the following photos taken from previous seasons, I have them growing in my "trash to treasure" book rack lined with moss. They went through one winter night freeze, neglect, no watering, no fertilizer with minimal damage. The ones in the carport jungle look much better since they are being pampered and I will soon transfer some of them to renourish the rack. I'll take some recent photos soon.











I'm getting the gardening bug again . . .
it makes me smile!





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