Well, this morning I had to report for Jury Duty.  That went very well, and I wound up being cut loose early. Happy Mykey!

Imagine my disappointment when I got home and took a look in my garden and found that my latest Datura bloom was a malformed flower!

Part of the first petal are missing.

This is what it SHOULD look like, but the other side has no surrounding petal!

While it IS still pretty and has a wonderful fragrance, it has a strange problem in that the outer petal does not continue around the entire flower.  This is supposed to be a double petaled flower hybrid, and before it was eaten to death by that "Horned Caterpillar" it DID have it.  I'm wondering if it could have something to do with not receiving enough plant food, or if it needs some other sort of plant food to make the flowers form properly again.  I'm still hoping for advice from any one who might read this out there in the blogosphere.

But I want to talk about another of my cool plants today!

Here is a photo of my Alligator Aloe...

The plant in front is Alligator Aloe

I absolutely LOVE this plant for some reason.  It's not your typical "Burn Plant" aloe vera, but you can see that it's related.  I love the jagged spikes across the edges of the leaves, and I love the little pups that it puts out.  I'm not sure, but I get the feeling that that pups are considered the tail of the plant and the big Aloe floret is considered the head of the alligator.  The pups are strange in that they don't seem to form the rosette type aloe plant that this one has.  This one has had three pups, but I moved one into another pot.  I have that one growing in a different part of the garden by itself and it's just kind of sitting there...not growing, not dying, and NOT putting out the neat floret part that I love about Aloe. I've looked for this plant online and when if I find it online it always appears to be a much darker green color with lighter green flecks throughout the plant rather than the grey/green coloring that this one is showing.  I like the ones on the internet much better than mine, even though mine does seem to be quite healthy.  I'm going to do some research into this and see what I can find out about it.  Always interested to hear others experiences about plants they see here on my blog too, so if you have one of these and can share your knowledge, please do!

Tomorrow I'm going to change the format of how I do this.  I'm going to try to concentrate on a project a day rather than the million little things that crop up on a day to day basis.  I'm going to try to do step by step What I'm doing type stuff.  If you have any questions or requests, please make them via comments.  Once I get a groove going and find a real direction for this, then it's going to become fun!