Start of Friday Foliage, Flowers and Fruits photog

So, working on this organization and discipline thing with the blog (as usual) that will hopefully provide good content, learning for you and me, interesting dialogue and updates on my garden as well as assuring a good amount of photographs, consistently.

Here's the plan, feel free to comment and tell me if you think this is a good/bad idea:

-MONDAYs: Going ons in my garden
-TUESDAYs: Plant spotlight either in my garden, or of one of my interest
-WEDNESDAYs: Plant/nature poetry, sorry, need to get that creative urge out.  If it's painful for you, skip this day
-THURSDAYs: Horticulture lesson, for my sake, I want to understand all those fun terms like pinnate leaves and crap
-FRIDAYs: Foliage, flowers and fruit photographs in excess for your weekend viewing pleasure (I hope)

So, I guess here's to kicking off my new Friday tradition!

The ornamental Black Pearl pepper is fruiting and looking gorgeous!

I'd like to call this pic, jestingly, "Spicy hot pic of myself"  If you click on the pic, you can see clearer the reflection of me in the pepper berries.

 More detail and still some reflections of me

I love the colors of this pepper, the fade of red and black!   Tiny spiders making webs between the berries.

I find the foliage of Black Pearl very attractive too, a purple-green-black-bronze burnish.

A cluster of spider webby berries

Immature berries with lone purple flower

The contrast of the green background was nice I thought.  These are like jewels! Who needs rubies or amethysts when there are these plants? 

Hyacinth bean, or lab-lab bean I learned is another name for this plant recently.  Lovely dark purple edible pods eventually.

Not a great pic, but interesting of inside of a rose mallow flower with focus on stamens.  The petal ribs were a cool pleated effect I thought.

A little duller in color, but more equalized focus here again.  Someday I'll get this one right.

Let's pretend to see beauty in destruction ok?  This is the sawfly (that we identified earlier with Dr. Turpin from Purdue's help) damage.  Specifically this is a hibiscus sawfly that has affected the previously shown Rose Mallow hibiscus and this Red River hibiscus.  It seems that I'll need to get pyrethrin to treat the sawfly larval damage as neem hasn't worked.  Luckily, I learned that the Haight Ashbury, and other hibiscus sabdariffa varieties are resistant to this sawfly, so the hibiscus that are delicious are being spared. Yea.

 Closeup of damage.  Lacey, could be pretty almost.  Who needs to crochet when the bugs do it for you?

Taking pics of these new untouched by sawfly damaged hibiscus leaves was wonderful (Doesn't it look like it's indicating to you to come to it?).  Slightly stupid breathless commentary I wrote in haste of this below:

I hold my breath as I take the pictures, one after another, not wanting to breathe  because the inhalation of air would travel from my nose to my lungs, expanding my chest  and raising my arms and moving my hands, ruining the picture.  I begin to see stars and   blackness creeping in at the edges of my vision.  Beauty is literally suffocating me.   The leaves, cupped up, catch the wind, cups of wind, holding distillations of air from  who knows where.  The leaves, full of wind, are able to move the entirety of the tree  in one direction to another. The tree would travel and follow the wind if it could give  up its rooty anchor, but it's content just to sip the wind that flows into its cups.  I  wonder if it would appreciate me digging it up and putting it on a well oiled wagon so  that it might be able to travel with the wind as I can tell it yearns to, but it is too pragmatic and has set down deep roots.  This is home to it, in my yard, and I am glad that it has stayed despite the bugs, despite my poor watering and neglect.

New leaves, what can be more beautiful?

This one reminded me of a chameleon, with little arms!

One final curl.  


Have a great weekend and I hope your garden is doing better than mine!

Plant Catalog Porn: Baker Creek Seeds (and now I am on a complete plant/seed moratorium for the rest of the year)

Alright, kind of late jumping on this bandwagon here, but for a while I also had a slight moratorium on plant catalogs in addition to my not buying seeds from catalog  as I had so many seeds in backlog already and in effort to save money and support local groups/businesses.

But after my sister in law told me about the rareseeds.com catalog (which I didn't realize at the time was Baker's Creek Seeds which I often would drool online over) I decided I would finally order their free catalog.

Here's where I get teenage girl-y:
OMG!  It's so beautiful and awesome that I can't believe that give this catalog away for free.  GIANT, glossy paged (not so sure how environmentally friendly or cost effective that is), but I went through EVERY page lusting after all the heirloom, non-GMO seeds that I can later seed save from (!!!) and thus save money still yet in the long run!

This is literally what their catalog looks now in my hands.  DOG-EARED. Yep. I want every edible (and herb) available just about:

Not only are the featured pics lovely Many of their descriptions are humorous and informative and have background stories which make the seeds even more endearing.

The only annoyance about the size of the catalog is that because of its size, space is precious and basic helpful info such as height, width, growing conditions and etc. are left out (not like places like Gurney's don't do it either), so it's very forgivable and I tend to like to research my seeds prior to purchase ahead anyways.

I did end up purchasing something (guilt) because I have never seen it anywhere else: Hibiscus sabdariffa seeds, aka at Baker Creek 'Red Thai Roselle.'  THESE are the seeds/plants I've  been looking for everywhere.  It is the source of the red hibiscus tea that my husband and I so love and I've been on an edible hibiscus (the Haight-Ashbury being the closest to this roselle and note almost all hibiscus are edible) collecting spree due to this one plant.

The seeds came very quickly (so hurray on that fast shipping thing!) but I was once again somewhat annoyed by lack of information once again on the packet as to expected size/height and etc.  Granted I understand that growing conditions can cause many differences in plant size, it's nice to be able to provide that. 

Either way, splendid experience thus far and I'd like to add that their website has a "wish list" section... one that is filling up very quickly for me!

I would also like to anonunce that am putting myself on a COMPLETE MORATORIUM for the REST OF THE YEAR for plant/seed/pot/garden accessory purchases unless it's a dying vegetable plant that must be replaced emergency (aka tomatoes) or a need to treat plants for a disease/pest scenario. UPDATE: or for supplies (seed/soil) needed for food for next year's crop or a covercrop for the winter/spring.

After all the wonderful plant sales in the area and local stores have seed sales up the wazoo, AND now these Baker Creek Seeds being purchased (because I apparently couldn't help myself in this one case) I feel like I am full up on good plants/seeds and need to work with what I have (so early on in the year too! Kind of sad)

So, no new clearance plants, even if the price is amazing, no seeds, despite sales.  Only trading or propagating (which I always do anyways) here on out!  Wish me luck (I hope I don't go crazy).


LINKS OF INTEREST:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roselle_(plant)
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/roselle.html
http://www.suagcenter.com/documents/HibiscusTea.pdf
http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Hibiscus+sabdariffa
http://rareseeds.com/cart/products/Thai_Red_Roselle-719-0.html
http://www.southernexposure.com/productlist/prods/71301.html