New Addition to the yard...The Gardenia!

It snuck up on me so fast, and now it's nearly upon me!  It's the end of January in South Texas, and that means one thing for sure...It's the start of the new gardening season!

Of course this is the very tip of the gardening season.  What we do here at this time of the year is start getting our seeds planted for next year in our little gardening trays, getting the leaves and such raked up and out of the way, and sharpening the pruning shears so that we can trim things that we forgot to trim in the fall a good trimming before the new full on growth period comes upon us.

This year I would very much like to have a vegetable garden, and I'm considering asking the landlord if I can rent some space in this big field that we have behind us for a garden plot.  I figure if I were to offer her an extra ten or 15 per month on the rent, she might give me a bit of square footage to make a larger vegetable garden.  In the past, Mr Martinez, God rest his soul, allowed other tenants to plant back there for free (okay...one time) so I'm hoping I can pretend that theres precedent.

In the meantime, today I'm trimming back the Chrysanthemums and Gardenia bushes that I just inherited from my father on the other side of town.  He does that kind of thing for me...keeps his plants until they are near death, then I view it as a personal challenge to see whether or not I can bring it back from the dead or not.

I'm really looking forward to this Gardenia!  I've never tried one of those before, and especially not trying to keep one in a 5-10 gallon pot!  We bought this one in 2010 as a present for my Mom (she only got to see it for a few months before she became bed ridden).  Dad had a monsterous Oak tree cut down in his back yard to allow some sun to get to the yard so that he could grow stuff...flowers and vegetables.  That left big stumps in the yard, and he decided to build these above the ground flower containers around them to plant flowers in, and hopefully the stumps would eventually rot from being buried and watered on a regular basis. At first the Gardenia THRIVED and got so big that it required the whole box to keep it, alone, with no other flowers surrounding it.  Then it started to die. It turned out that the roots had overgrown the container, and that the stump was causing the Gardenia to be, shall we say, poisoned?  Additionally, the roots had no where to go, and the plant slowly started to die.

In this state, Dad asked us to move the Gardenia to another part of the yard.  We did it, but it was at a time when the flower gardens and sprinkler systems were still under construction.  The bush didn't get the attention it needed while this other stuff was being worked on, and it never recovered.  For a couple of months, it looked dead.

Then it rained!  We hadn't had rain in about 5 months, and it was such a welcome sight!

About two weeks after it rained, tiny little leaves started to show up on the plant.  It was kind of a last ditch effort for the plant to revive, I think.  Unfortunately for the plant, Dad had decided to redo the flower beds entirely, and wanted the Gardenia removed since it was dead.

So this past Friday, Dana and I went to Dad's house and dug the poor thing up again.  It's now in a HUGE pot...one made for a good sized palm tree, and I'm hoping that the transition will be much easier for it this time.  The roots gave no resistance when it came up this time, and there is plenty of room in there for it to continue it's recovery.  I'm hoping that it won't go into shock at all this time.  At least I'm hoping...and praying.

I'll keep everyone posted on this.  The Gardenia is one of my absolute favorite flowers!

Livingstone Garden Daisy

Late last summer I was still on this crazy kick of trying to get all the plant life I could muster together.  My windowsills abound with pots filled with seeding medium and glasses of water, trying  (somewhat successfully) to get things to root, and then to get them to grow in the sandy and salty coastal bend soil.

One of my unmitigated successes was rooting something called the "Livingstone Daisy" or "Mezoo Trailing Red."  Of course, at the time I took the cutting the plant was not blooming and I had no way of knowing what the beautiful little plant was.  I just knew that it had these thick little leaves and looked like a succulent, so I needed to have one!  I had discovered it on the church grounds, and on that particular day I was lucky enough to have the master gardener of the church with me on this particular stroll, and I was rewarded with a nice cutting to work with.

Picture comes from "Southeast Florida Garden Evolvement", another great blog on Blogger!  this person doesn't know I'm using it, but I can't find a working address to mail them and find out if I can!  I hate when this happens!  If they ask me to take it down, I certainly will.  Its just temp until I can show off my own plant.

Anyway, this little plant rooted with minimal problems and within 30 days I had my very first bloom on it.  It took several months for another, but after that it just sorta exploded with tons of these tiny, hot pink blossoms about half the size of the pad of your thumb.  Another big plus of this plant is that it's been so easy to keep here in this weird South Texas weather.  It's handled the changes from the mid 30's all the way up to the 105 degree mark without batting an eye.  Of course, I always keep it watered well, and make sure that it has good soil with lots of oxygen in it.

So, when you folks out there in gardening land decide to get creative with your container gardens this year (as I plan to do), think about this wonderful little plant.  It will give you a great dash of hot pink right where you wan it, and you can pretty much ignore the plant most of the time as well.

Happy Gardening!