Tired gardener

Spent most of the day doing major cleanup in the yard, had to clear the underbrush away from the sprinklers and remove the buildup of dead ferns and prune or tie the fuchsia a bit here and there and weed-whack here and there with my widdle electwic weed whacker.

So foo. Anyhow, here's my computer screen this morning. The Macbook is in lozenge mode (that silvery thing over to the right). The big server that runs Windows 7 and Centos 6.2 (in a VirtualBox VM, it handles the RAID arrays because Linux is the universal solvent of networks, capable of providing filesystems to both Windows and Mac systems in their native protocols) is that big black box below it. That's a 25" monitor. The keyboard is an Apple Bluetooth wireless keyboard, and the trackpad beside it is an Apple MagicPad multi-touch thingy that I like because it lets me go swipe-swipe-swipe and do all sorts of things depending on how many fingers and what direction I'm swiping (and the whole trackpad is a button -- it has two little feet that also serve as buttons below it). Atop the sound system on the shelf above the desk are the keyboard and mouse for the big server, I usually RDP in from the Macbook using Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection client for MacOS (I have the Linux VM set to start up in the background so I RDP to it too). To the right, out of picture, is the big HP printer-scanner-copier that I barely use nowadays.

Just feeling geeky. Something to do while tired, heh.

-- Badtux the Tired Garden Penguin(*)
(*) Not to be confused with a garden gnome, penguins are much more handsome!

The Reverse Plant Rustler

The neighbor in the unit on the other side of the duplex now has flowers and fresh mulch in his flower bed. I dunno how that happened, they just sorta appeared there in the middle of the night :).

-- Badtux the Gardening Penguin

Friday garden porn

At the end of April, here's the rosemary, freshly planted:

As of yesterday, here's the rosemary, after getting watered once a week via filling its basin:

Yeah, I think it's gonna fill that corner of the garden nicely :).

-- Badtux the Gardening Penguin

Pink explosion

The rose bush apparently likes the combination of fertilizer and water that it's getting, because it's literally exploded with pink flowers.

The star jasmine next door to it seems to be doing pretty good too. I keep having to hack it away from the rose bush though because it wants to totally take over the place...

-- Badtux the Gardening Penguin

Say hello to Rosie

No no, not the ramblin' rose. Rosie the ROSEMARY. That little splotch of green near the foot of the step, between the rose bush and the new back fence.

Don't laugh. Imagine that little splotch of green being six feet tall and four feet wide, which is going to totally happen, if not overnight. Rosie's going to take up that corner quite nicely, thank you very much!

-- Badtux the Gardening Penguin

The Great Wall of Santa Clara

The fence guy came and put up this *gigantic" fence in my back yard -- I hadn't put in any plants because I assumed they would tear up any landscaping that was in the way, and I was right. This is the view basically out my back window right now. I used to be able to see the top of the back windows of the house behind me, now it's completely hidden all the way to the rooftop.

Now to figure out what to put in that strip between the pavers and the fence... this is, alas, the north side of the fence, so it stays in shade most of the time. Greens, I suppose. Sigh! I do know what's going into the corner by that step though -- that's where the rosemary bush will be.

-- Badtux the Fenced-in Penguin

A death, and a birth

So last night we had some really wild weather here in the Sillycone Valley. Somewhere around midnight I heard a loud CRASH, from the side of the house. I figured probably something in the trash area had blown over.

So today I head to the side yard with a piece of hose, a screwdriver, a couple of wood screws, and a piece of baling wire, intending to better secure one of the fuchsia bushes whose wire tie had started getting loose, and... the cause of the crash was the fuchsia bush at the end, whose tiedown had snapped and the whole thing had fallen over against the house, uprooted. So I sighed and cut it down all the way to the twigs coming off from the base, hoping that there's enough roots left to support them... and discovered that my layering of those twigs, as they ran along the ground, had actually *worked*. Yes, they had *rooted*.

I hadn't even known that fuchsia would do that. I just saw those branches rambling sideways across the ground last year, and figured, "maybe they'll do like fig trees and root if I dig a little trench and cover part of them." The fuchsia bushes were old and semi-rotted, clearly not healthy, so propagating new fuchsia bushes to take their place was clearly a good idea.

So anyhow, there was three of these twigs that had rooted. I left two of them in place because they were close enough to the fence that the survivor will be in the right place. I cut off the third and buried it deeper further down the fence row, to extend the fuchsia line closer to the back yard. I will water it a couple times a day for the next week in hopes that it actually survives, then taper that off to once a day for the rest of the spring and summer. But I think the chances are pretty good that at least *one* of these will survive.

So my former big pretty fuchsia at the end of the row is no more... but it looks like there will be one, maybe two, to take its place. The cycle of life continues...

-- Badtux the Gardening Penguin

Sunny day

Today was 72F and sunny here in the Silly Cone Valley. Eat yer heart out, Northeast and Midwest :).

The rose bushes were starting to put on a tiny bit of new growth, so I pruned them back and fertilized them and watered in the fertilizer. I also cut back the vine that spends all summer flowering and attracting hummingbirds and bees, it was threatening to take over the place. This same vine was at my old place and they always cut it back severely this time of year, it always grew back with tons of new flowers, so I figure that's the right thing to do. I also soaped down the aphids on my trumpet vines, sigh! Oh well, at least they keep the aphids off of everything else.

Still left to do: The lemon trees are still ripening their latest crop of fruits, so I can't prune them back right now. The fuchsias need pruning back since they make their flowers on new growth, but I'll need to be careful there, they are old and not very healthy. Things are looking a bit dry right now, but we're supposed to get rain on Monday and Tuesday so I'm reluctant to water...

-- Badtux the Gardening Penguin

Some Thursday garden porn

Mandy is doing a lot better than the scraggly half-dead thing I photographed two months ago since she started getting regular doses of water and some fertilizer. This is of course a Mandevilla Red Riding Hood, semi-reclining though some tendrils are heading up the lattice... oh yeah, I put some drip irrigation down as you can see, it should be hidden in the mulch whenever I decide what kind of mulch I want (sigh!)....

-- Badtux the Garden Penguin

Another gardening question

So... what kind of plant is this? It appears to be a sprawling vine of some sort, with red trumpet-shaped flowers. Hmm. (Note - you can click on the photo for a bigger version).

- Badtux the Gardening Penguin

And on a lighter side....

Can anybody identify this large rambling bush for me? It has heart-shaped serrated leaves, pendulous purple flowers, rambles like a rambling rose, and seems to like the shady spot between the house and the fence.

-- Badtux the Gardening Penguin

What kind of flower is this?

It was almost dead when I moved into the new place, but it resurrected itself when I gave it water. But what is it? Curious penguins are.... curious!

-- Badtux the Gardening Penguin