![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Flowers for Fools
May. 14th, 2020 09:13 pmIt was a typical week. My work buddy Madi made scrunchies and ended up with too many, so she brought some in to work for us to have. Yay! I felt very 80s wearing it, and that's exactly why I love it!
Mother's Day was a little weird at work, there were lots of calls so I ended up on the phones pretty much all day. I wasn't able to get much schoolwork done and some of my errands got sidetracked so overall I was kind of in a bad mood by the time I got home. But there will always be days like this.
The week seemed to drag on because I was really looking forward to planting a pollinator garden on Wednesday!
This is something I've been thinking about since moving here. I don't want to plant in the "yard" because it's such a small strip of land and the HOA will want to mow back there. My planter is behind the pool screen so even if I put flowers in it, it would just be a tease for the bees. My passion vine will have attractive flowers at some point, but who knows if that will be this summer or next.
Behind our property fence is a swampy area that leads to a lake (we can't see the lake, we're too far from it). The plants that grow naturally back there are shrubs and trees, some pawpaws and cacti as well as weeds and tall grasses, a lot of which are dead. The pawpaw and cacti flowered once and that was it.
There happens to be a hole in the fence right by our house, so earlier in the year I climbed through and cleared some of the dead plants and brush closest to our house. There was also a lot of trash back there from trashy tourists who had stayed in our house or other vacation homes previously, and who were too lazy to put out the trash. After removing a lot of that, I was left with a little space like this:
Every time I go out onto the pool deck, I look at this bare space and the dead plants all around and think about what I could do to make it better. Technically this isn't our property, so I was leery about doing anything back there. But after living here a while it's become pretty clear that the HOA could care less. So this Wednesday I finally decided to do it! Plant some summer-hardy flowers to attract bees and butterflies!
I prepped the area by digging straight down about a foot. The "soil" is 100% sand which was disappointing but not surprising.
Then I laid down a bag of Black Cow compost, mixing it in with the sand to make it more nutritious for the plants. One bag didn't seem like enough, so I added a second bag to my list for Lowe's.
Then it was time to get some plants. You guys, I've been looking forward to this all week!!
Using the internet for research I decided on mostly perrennials that could hold up to the intense Florida heat:
Coreopsis, Evolvulus (or "Blue Daze"), Pentas, Lavender, and Milkweed.
I found all of these at Lowe's (they stock whatever will grow in the store's planting zone for that time of year.)
After picking up the coreopsis I had an entourage of bees following me around the store, attracted by the bright yellow flower. Adorable!!
They were interested in other flowers too of course, so after watching to see which flowers they frequented I added a few more plants that hadn't been on my list. I'm not even totally sure what I got, I just went with whatever the bees liked. I think I got some kind of small white daisy, some African daisies, and a tall thing with orange-yellow tiny flowers at the top, no idea what it is. Whatever! And I grabbed a balloon flower just because I enjoyed the color and wanted to see if it could survive these conditions. Oh, and a hanging basket of purslane because I found the colors so vibrant <3 With all of this plus my bag of Black Cow it was pretty obvious what I was up to! I felt really grateful to be able to indulge my hobby like this :)
Back at home I unloaded everything and got to work. I laid down the second bag of compost and started transplanting the flowers. It was the middle of the afternoon, the hottest part of day and the worst time to be transplanting. Not surprisingly everything wilted a little, but I did my best to work quickly and avoid too much trauma. When everyone was in the ground I tried watering and saw that too much water was running downhill (the plot is sloped) so I stole a little mulch from our house border to help prevent erosion. Here is the end result; everything is a little wilted but hopefully they will rally!
In addition, I installed some red impatiens and more blue daze in the mulch behind the pool deck.
The blue daze isn't blooming yet but I hope it will!
After all that I was pretty tired, but went on a walk with Jameson who had just finished a lot of his work for the day. He recently had some drama with getting a new keyboard delivered to the house...it arrived broken, which was really disappointing. Fortunately the company he bought it from stepped up and made it right, so he was able to get another working keyboard just 24 hours later! Pretty amazing. So he's been playing with his new "toy" and really enjoying it a lot. It's a keyboard he's been dreaming about getting for a long time, and I can tell how much he's enjoying it :)
Anyway, after our walk we ordered some big ol' tacos from local restaurant El Patron, then spent the rest of the evening chilling out.
On Thursday I was pleased to see that most of the plants in my new garden had rallied very well. If you compare this pic to the one of the garden right after planting you can see that some plants are standing taller and their blooms are a bit more "open". This is a good sign. One of the lavendar plants still looks kinda traumatized because I was too rough with it, but oh well :P
In the afternoon I hung some more plant hooks so the purslane could go up. It looks so nice!
I'm hoping to get one more hanging basket. Also thinking of moving some of the purslane to the pollinator bed since it's so colorful and is supposed to do well in dry conditions.
I mostly chilled out for the afternoon as gardening the day before really kicked my ass. I haven't been able to go to the gym for months and suddenly did a bunch of hard labor, not the brightest idea huh! At some point I went to check on the plants and panicked a little because they were wilting again :/ but after some more research it seems like a lot of heat-tolerant plants will do that during the hottest part of the day. It seems weird to me, but I will try to trust that these plants can sustain themselves for now. I'll leave them alone for a few days and water them with fertilizer next time to give them a little more support.
For dinner I made pork chops with a maple, mustard, apple glaze and roasted potatoes and brussels. It was really tasty!
We also had Mexican Cokes and Fanta because I was craving them :)
After dinner Jameson had to teach a class so I made some recordings for steno, then enjoyed the second half of my Mexican Coke with some vanilla ice cream. It was a really nice weekend, made even better with the knowledge that I will also have this coming Sunday off! I decided since we can't go anywhere for a while I may as well use some PTO and give myself some extra time off. Sometimes you just gotta, you know?
Mother's Day was a little weird at work, there were lots of calls so I ended up on the phones pretty much all day. I wasn't able to get much schoolwork done and some of my errands got sidetracked so overall I was kind of in a bad mood by the time I got home. But there will always be days like this.
The week seemed to drag on because I was really looking forward to planting a pollinator garden on Wednesday!
This is something I've been thinking about since moving here. I don't want to plant in the "yard" because it's such a small strip of land and the HOA will want to mow back there. My planter is behind the pool screen so even if I put flowers in it, it would just be a tease for the bees. My passion vine will have attractive flowers at some point, but who knows if that will be this summer or next.
Behind our property fence is a swampy area that leads to a lake (we can't see the lake, we're too far from it). The plants that grow naturally back there are shrubs and trees, some pawpaws and cacti as well as weeds and tall grasses, a lot of which are dead. The pawpaw and cacti flowered once and that was it.
There happens to be a hole in the fence right by our house, so earlier in the year I climbed through and cleared some of the dead plants and brush closest to our house. There was also a lot of trash back there from trashy tourists who had stayed in our house or other vacation homes previously, and who were too lazy to put out the trash. After removing a lot of that, I was left with a little space like this:
Every time I go out onto the pool deck, I look at this bare space and the dead plants all around and think about what I could do to make it better. Technically this isn't our property, so I was leery about doing anything back there. But after living here a while it's become pretty clear that the HOA could care less. So this Wednesday I finally decided to do it! Plant some summer-hardy flowers to attract bees and butterflies!
I prepped the area by digging straight down about a foot. The "soil" is 100% sand which was disappointing but not surprising.
Then I laid down a bag of Black Cow compost, mixing it in with the sand to make it more nutritious for the plants. One bag didn't seem like enough, so I added a second bag to my list for Lowe's.
Then it was time to get some plants. You guys, I've been looking forward to this all week!!
Using the internet for research I decided on mostly perrennials that could hold up to the intense Florida heat:
Coreopsis, Evolvulus (or "Blue Daze"), Pentas, Lavender, and Milkweed.
I found all of these at Lowe's (they stock whatever will grow in the store's planting zone for that time of year.)
After picking up the coreopsis I had an entourage of bees following me around the store, attracted by the bright yellow flower. Adorable!!
They were interested in other flowers too of course, so after watching to see which flowers they frequented I added a few more plants that hadn't been on my list. I'm not even totally sure what I got, I just went with whatever the bees liked. I think I got some kind of small white daisy, some African daisies, and a tall thing with orange-yellow tiny flowers at the top, no idea what it is. Whatever! And I grabbed a balloon flower just because I enjoyed the color and wanted to see if it could survive these conditions. Oh, and a hanging basket of purslane because I found the colors so vibrant <3 With all of this plus my bag of Black Cow it was pretty obvious what I was up to! I felt really grateful to be able to indulge my hobby like this :)
Back at home I unloaded everything and got to work. I laid down the second bag of compost and started transplanting the flowers. It was the middle of the afternoon, the hottest part of day and the worst time to be transplanting. Not surprisingly everything wilted a little, but I did my best to work quickly and avoid too much trauma. When everyone was in the ground I tried watering and saw that too much water was running downhill (the plot is sloped) so I stole a little mulch from our house border to help prevent erosion. Here is the end result; everything is a little wilted but hopefully they will rally!
In addition, I installed some red impatiens and more blue daze in the mulch behind the pool deck.
The blue daze isn't blooming yet but I hope it will!
After all that I was pretty tired, but went on a walk with Jameson who had just finished a lot of his work for the day. He recently had some drama with getting a new keyboard delivered to the house...it arrived broken, which was really disappointing. Fortunately the company he bought it from stepped up and made it right, so he was able to get another working keyboard just 24 hours later! Pretty amazing. So he's been playing with his new "toy" and really enjoying it a lot. It's a keyboard he's been dreaming about getting for a long time, and I can tell how much he's enjoying it :)
Anyway, after our walk we ordered some big ol' tacos from local restaurant El Patron, then spent the rest of the evening chilling out.
On Thursday I was pleased to see that most of the plants in my new garden had rallied very well. If you compare this pic to the one of the garden right after planting you can see that some plants are standing taller and their blooms are a bit more "open". This is a good sign. One of the lavendar plants still looks kinda traumatized because I was too rough with it, but oh well :P
In the afternoon I hung some more plant hooks so the purslane could go up. It looks so nice!
I'm hoping to get one more hanging basket. Also thinking of moving some of the purslane to the pollinator bed since it's so colorful and is supposed to do well in dry conditions.
I mostly chilled out for the afternoon as gardening the day before really kicked my ass. I haven't been able to go to the gym for months and suddenly did a bunch of hard labor, not the brightest idea huh! At some point I went to check on the plants and panicked a little because they were wilting again :/ but after some more research it seems like a lot of heat-tolerant plants will do that during the hottest part of the day. It seems weird to me, but I will try to trust that these plants can sustain themselves for now. I'll leave them alone for a few days and water them with fertilizer next time to give them a little more support.
For dinner I made pork chops with a maple, mustard, apple glaze and roasted potatoes and brussels. It was really tasty!
We also had Mexican Cokes and Fanta because I was craving them :)
After dinner Jameson had to teach a class so I made some recordings for steno, then enjoyed the second half of my Mexican Coke with some vanilla ice cream. It was a really nice weekend, made even better with the knowledge that I will also have this coming Sunday off! I decided since we can't go anywhere for a while I may as well use some PTO and give myself some extra time off. Sometimes you just gotta, you know?
