Poinsettia

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I am happy to be able to post today. This blog/site has undergone some big changes. Okay, so there’s nothing different you can see, but I recently changed web hosts. I thought I had it, but my computer lied to me and then I spent a couple hours finding and fixing what was wrong. Quite exciting. I actually loving solving computer problems, provided I have nothing else to do, and it doesn’t take me forever.

It is winter and snowy. Actually today we had rain on top of snow, so everything is slush. Not horrible for Christmas–maybe some of the snow/slush will stick around until then. I also was given a poinsettia for a Christmas present that is now brightening up my house. It got a little tattered in the several car rides it took to get it here, but I just need it to last for a week. I’m actually more worried about the over-watering (a perpetual problem of retail store plants) for long term survival.

The question is, do I want to keep it after Christmas? Many people have it as a year-round houseplant. But poinsettias need long day length to form the lovely red leaves (they are not flowers, so you know). That means around 12 hrs or so of uninterrupted darkness. A single bulb on can ruin the flowering process. I used to know a bunch of sciency details about this all. I don’t want to look it all up, the results are all that is important anyway.

I might keep it, if its doing well and not giving me too many problems. But I’m planning on throwing it out. After all, a trip to nursery in the winter is something to look forward too.

Yellow Optimism

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I have a new goal: to take a picture of the sunrise everyday for a year. The picture above was taken this morning. It was wonderful. I was feeling sorry for myself, looked outside and all bad feelings were gone (mostly). I find it easy to get discouraged about life. For instance  today I baked dozens of neighbor cookies that took up a large portion of my day. And I do not like cooking cookies. So at first I felt quite badly about my day. But on the plus side, I have fun cookies to give away. And I did not waste my day away. There is optimism in everything we do. We just have to find it.

Christmas is Coming

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We didn’t go on a hike this week. Instead we went Christmas shopping and watched Harry Potter. I was happy to find some very good deals shopping, along with using e-bay. Plus I found 4 new shirts for $10 and Joe found a pair of shoe for $6. That was at DI, that is kind of a hit and miss store, but is often very useful to stay under budget. So most of the presents are wrapped under the tree.

Last week I also celebrated Hanukkah for the first time, with my neighbor who has Jewish heritage. Besides eating wonderful traditional food like latkes, we made and lighted menorahs with clay and birthday candles. It was quite fun. And for the first time in my life I saw a birthday candle melt all the way down. It doesn’t take very long. When we were first invited, I wondered why we would celebrate Hanukkah because we are not Jewish. But it’s a fun tradition that I think wouldn’t mind doing every year. So thanks to my neighbor for introducing me!

Another fun happening was watching my little brother play jr. high basketball. It’s entertaining. And not stressful. Sometimes with sporting events its easy to care a lot who wins, but Junior High its not as big a deal. Plus my brothers team did blow out the other team. Peter really enjoyed it as well. I’m disappointed my brother isn’t playing college ball this year (he just had back surgery)–last year we did go to a few of his games and had lots of fun.  But the little brother’s games are fun too.

 

Five Books From the Extension Office

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My gardening books might differ from an average gardener because most were bought as textbooks. When looking through them I realized that many of my favorite were the ones that I used the most during my long internship at the extension office. These were the one I frantically looked for when someone wanted an immediate answer on the other end of the phone, or pulled out and refereed to when someone came in. None are good reads. But they are wonderful gardening reference books.

Weeds of the West

Want to know what weed it is? Look it up in this book. If its a weed, you will find it in this book with only a few exceptions. If you garden, get this book. Because we all deal with weeds, and its easier to deal with them if you know what they are.

Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propogation and Uses

This is the bible for woody plant information. No book compares. I also use the more reader friendly Dirr’s Hardy Trees and Shrubs. Colored pictures there make it easier for identification.

Manual of Herbaceous Ornamental Plants

There are plenty of herbaceous plant books out there. This is my favorite for basic plant info reference. Its getting old (17 years!) and needs updating, but I still like the format.

PNW Insect Management/Disease Management/Weed Management and UW Weed Management

Now I’m excited: these books are online! Didn’t know that. And I know: there are actually four books that I am counting as one. But they extremely similar and worth mentioning. They update them yearly, and they include everything you’d want to know to take care of pests. It’s a lot of chemical recommendations, but also most other control methods as well.

Hartmann & Kester’s Plant Propagation: Principles and Practices (8th Edition)

There are more interesting books out there. But as a reference book this is the best. All the technique on how to do anything propagation wise, along with a large section on how to propagate most plants. It’s expensive: I would buy the old edition.

Thanks for suggesting, North Coast Gardening!

Sick

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My family was sick. They are mostly better now. Peter had icky stomach flu for too long, and he still doesn’t have the appetite he used to.  Plus he is teething. No fever though. Poor kid. I got to experience the lovely joy of cleaning up bodily fluids, sometimes as they were smeared all over myself. He is a asleep now. No afternoon nap = bed time at 6:30. Not too fond of that, and hopefully he doesn’t decide to wake up at 4:00 in the morning. *Update: He did. 3:00 actually, went back to sleep after much crying, fusing, and mommy grumbling at 4:30.

Joe had icky stomach flu for a day. I never got it, at least not bad. I have slept a lot, and had a few headaches that I am attributing to it. I don’t know how to stay home sick either. I like to go do things to much, so we actually did go hiking. But the air quality was horrible. At least we picked a non-interesting hike and it was warm. We went up to the bottom of the Y. Well made trail, but I’m thinking it would be quite hot and boring in the summer.

Housplants

Everything is covered in snow, but I’m actually more excited about how my plants are doing than most of the summer. My houseplants are blooming. Specifically the Swedish ivy (Plectranthus australis to be precise) that I have had for three years and have not seen a single bloom on it until now. The goldfish plant (Columner gloriosa) also has a few blooms, although it had more several weeks ago. Then it came under the wrath of my scissors and got quite a haircut.

Both plants are amazing hardy and vigorous houseplants, but they took three years to flower. I think they didn’t get enough light until this year,  now that I have nice sunny south facing windows. The flowers make me exceedingly happy. I only have three houseplants (and that’s enough for me), the two mentioned and a Ficus that hasn’t grown more than two inches in almost five years. The physiology of that plant might as well be plastic.

I do not take wonderful care of my houseplants. I had more. Last year they sat in the window sill behind a curtain in my cold bedroom. I froze them. They looked like this after I cut off the dead stuff:

When I moved, I decided revival was not worth it. So they were re-potted in the trash. The houseplants I have remaining can apparently take a little cold. My care included watering them, often much later than I should have, occasionally throwing fertilizer on them (slow release about once a year), giving haircuts when they get too big. I don’t repot anything, because I like the pots they are in. It’s too much work too, besides houseplants actually like being root-bound.

Hmmm…I was just reading up on goldfish plant and apparently it needs a little “extra care.” I disagree, since I haven’t given mine any, and it is doing great. Here’s some more pictures of my beloved houseplants. I was having fun with the goldfish plant:

Thanksgiving

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It came and went and was pretty uneventful. I went to my parents. It was small. My four grandparents (all alive and well, which is neat), parents, Riss and Daniel, and my little family were all there. One of the smallest thanksgivings I’ve had, but I enjoyed it. It was nice to be able to fit at one table and have leftover turkey. My mom is an excellent cook too, so all the food was wonderful. I poured rainbow jell-o again this year. Delicious–certainly the dish that makes thanksgiving thanksgiving. More so than turkey. We played apples to apples with everyone. I lost, didn’t get a single card. 😦 My grandparents even did better than me. Family is wonderful, and I’m lucky to have so much around.

We went to the Scarlet Pimpernal the night before. There was a guy in our ward that was in the play, but not performing that night because he switched. Should have checked. It was still good. The great thing was apparently Peter cried when we left, calmed down played for about twenty minutes and then he laid down and went to sleep on the floor. I love it when kids are good for babysitters. And I don’t think you can get much better.

I babysat a bunch of kids a couple weeks ago. It’s lots of fun. More kids aren’t that much harder either. They help entertain one another. I have a bunch of cute neighbor kids close in age to Peter. I like where I live because of that.

Heather was also able to stop by and take some family pictures for us on her way home from her in-laws thanksgiving. Peter was very tired, so we might try again when he’s not. But here are some of the ones I liked. (Heather wanted to edit them a bit, but I took them anyway. Because I don’t think they need it.)

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Winter Now

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We went hiking Friday. And on that hike I decided it is winter. It certainly didn’t feel anything like fall, minus the fact that we didn’t need to use snowshoes because the snow wasn’t that deep yet.

We went up Hobblecreek canyon to a trail we had gone on before. See this post. As you might have went back and remembered, there was a lot of stream crossings. It makes it a wonderful winter hike because the streams are frozen over and easy to cross. And I was able to see things like this:

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None of us froze, including Peter in his snowsuit. It was fun. I’m glad I don’t stop hiking just because it’s cold. We almost stayed out too long: the sun set on our way back, and the temperature started to drop. I forget it gets dark at 5:00. But we made it and drove home into the sunset.

Natural Landscaping

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=ginkggarde-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0875968856&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

I read this book ages ago. It’s not too bad. Maybe more emphasis on using native plants, and avoiding invasive plants would be helpful. The only bad thing was I took forever to read it and had to turn it into my library before I really wanted to. It does have a great section on meadow gardens, and lots of great step by step instructions. For instance, the meadow garden goes something like this (as a horrible paraphrase, because the book is at the library):

  • Get rid of whatever is in the spot you want to put your meadow.
  • Let all the weeds sprout, and get rid of them.
  • Wait a few weeks and get rid of all the weeds again.
  • Seed in the stuff you want for a meadow.
  • Weed some more.
  • Mow to about six inches high in late winter.
  • Add/modify plants as needed.
She takes a realistic view on things, because she’s done it. So a meadow isn’t presented as a maintenance free wonderland. There’s obvious advice, like leaving water out for birds, but also less often thought of advice like planting a ‘dead’ tree for shelter. Natural landscaping is a different way to garden, and it is presented very nicely in this book. It’s also a timely read, due to the desire to reduce lawn usage and garden more sustainably.

The Snow Came

I watered my houseplants today. That’s all the gardening I am going to do. It is cold outside. And it snowed. I will only go outside with small toddler to play, if we are both getting restless. Hence, the leaves are probably not going to get cleaned off my garden beds. That reminds me of several posts over at north cost gardening about whether or not you should remove leaves from gardening beds. Laziness, or a lack of desire to do anything substantial in the cold right now, is answering the question for me.

Winter is wonderful. No gardening chores to worry about. It’s just time to relax and make big plans for next year. I did start up a new site, somewhere to post a bunch of stuff I’ve written, or want to. It doesn’t have a lot up now, but I’m going to add to it gradually.