Wednesday, April 20, 2011

The Heat's On!

(click any pic to enlarge)
Volunteer mystery squash blooming and fruiting...

Butterfly weed making itself available for Monarch fly-bys and feasting...
Gynura procumbens cuttings sprouting...
Comfrey in bloom...
Confederate jasmine perfuming the air...
Jujube tree rapid new sucker growth...
Zinnias defying the heat with colorful impunity...
Birdbath surrounded by carpet of spring growth...
Grapes repositioned from buckets to trellis made of fencing sections turned upright...
The gorgeous proliferation of edible stinging chaya, back from the freezes once again...
Moringa cluster (left) as a nurse plant/semi-shade for the transplanted Brown Turkey Fig (right)...
The jujube...last year's thorny branches still not showing leaves, but new growth from the roots galore...
Sunflower seed escapees sprouting under the bird feeder...
Some flowers encouraged to naturalize...or is it we're lazy gardeners?  ;-)  We want those pollinators!
No trellis?  No problem...shrubbery will do just fine, ma'am...
Loquats...no fruit this year, but we LOVE our loquats!
Pentas singing their siren song for the butterflies...
A couple of hardy blooming shrubs added here and there...can't remember the name of this one, but love the blooms!
Smaller mystery shrub, different type, with small jasmine-type purple blooms...
Jack's new favorite way of propagating moringa...sections of old branches stuck into the ground in the fall...voila, now it sprouts!
No shrub is safe from The Vine That Would Be King
Plum tree!!!   There's another variety near by...hope my baby plums make it...I love plum trees!
The ugliness that will later become another patch of moringa...even amidst the bermuda...
Porch therapy...in the back is the ground orchid
Buckets o' babies
What's a picnic without some ants??  (this is said very sarcastically...we are overrun with the ants)
Ya take a chaya branch cutting, ya stick it in some potting soil...more edible shrubs on the way!
A sure sign the world renews itself yearly...green and blooming things...and Passover!!  Next year in Jerusalem :)

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Great pics, and great plants too ^_^

What zone are you in? I'm in 9b, but we've been having hard freezes 1-2 times a year the last few years, ugh!

I had a chaya in a pot, but it died while I was sick. I didn't even get to try eating it, because at the time, I didn't know what was making me sick, so I tried not eating during my "attacks". Darn, because it turns out it was some food additives, so I'm eating almost everything from scratch now, and have restarted gardening in containers.

Do you sell sticks of chaya and moringa? I could get moringa seeds from Echo, but I couldn't find chaya. Thanks either way, shreela AT gmail dot com

Robbyn said...

Hey Shreela, we actually ordered our chaya from online and went in person to ECHO and they currently carry the nonstinging chaya, so we got 2 from them. Our nonstinging ones are still somewhat babies, but I'm SURE by the summer we'll be making cuttings of them. Check back with us then and I'd love to see that you get some if you like. We found that we had MUCH more success putting them in the ground and then mulching them well...we are 9b, too, and we got down to the 20s many times this winter. It killed our one stinging chaya down to the ground for the second straight year, but for the second straight year it came back strong in the spring anyway...in the ground, when it got hot. So that's what we're trying with the non-stinging kind...they seem identical. The moringa can be propagated by sticking trimmings of the branches right down in good soil inground, or by seeds. We ordered our seeds from ECHO, and now we simply use the cut branches (sections of them) as shown in the pics to stick in the ground. They root there quite well if watered now and then in hot weather. They die back in the winter and come back from the ground when the weather warms again. My email is on the sidebar...let me know when you'd like some. We'll have some of all of it by a month or two :)

Judy T said...

Oh, looking at those lovely photos makes me wish even more for spring to REALLY be here. We're supposed to get below freezing here again tonight and we had snow over the weekend. Not even normal for us this time of year. sigh.....
Judy