Dragon's Orchid Garden

It's finally warm weather and we're cleaning up the yard.  There are a gazillion oak leaves and 500 bazillion acorns everywhere. From Blogger Pictures It seems there is a tool for picking up all of those acorns.  I knew someone must have invented a nut-picker-upper .  The folks at the local home improvement store had never heard of such a thing.  "Sounds like a good idea", they said.  Our acorns are small, and the description on Amazon doesn't say exactly what size nuts it picks up.  We may continue to rake and shovel them. Of course, the leaves go into the compost bin.  Acorns will sprout and grow, so we can't put those in the compost . We've had a compost bin for years. We keep adding kitchen scraps to it and leaves and turning it and at one time it was 1/2 full, and now it's just a couple of inches of not really great stuff to use on the garden. We discovered that we are doing a couple of things incorrectly. The bin was a bit large for t...

Most of the plants in our garden are in  terracotta pots.  Potted plants can be moved around until they find their happy place.  We're still working on making planting beds which is a lot of work in this sandy Florida soil.  It's much easier to find a pot, fill it with medium and put the plant in it.  I used to mix my own planting mix using top soil, manure, some peat moss soaked in water and vermiculite, but now I'm lazy and just buy bagged potting mix for all but the orchids. My handy husband, Wayne, is a yard sale meyven and has, more than once, found a bonanza of clay pots at a sale.  We have them cleaned and stacked in a shed and under the orchid tables waiting for just the right plant. Recently, our favorite family run nursery, Duncheon's , ran a "buy one get one free" sale. Wayne went there every weekend for the month of the sale and picked up at least two beautiful pots each time, mostly glazed in cobalt blue, my favorite color.  Here are s...

When we bought our house in 1992, the yard was a wasteland.  Literally.  It was awful.  If it hadn't been for the great neighborhood, and the big family room with 2 sets of french doors, a fireplace and a 1953 Brunswick regulation pool table that came with the place, we would have passed.  The yard needed a lot of work.  There were no plants except for several large oak trees and a camphor tree in the front.  There was no grass, just sandy dirt and a big burn pile in the back. One of the first things we wanted to do was create beds.  A dear neighbor gave us a whole pallet of bricks.  She and her soon-to-be-ex had purchased them, but didn't use them before they had to divide property and sell their house. Pam just wanted them out of her yard.  We dug trenches and laid the bricks to edge beds, setting the tops level with the ground so that mowing would be easy. From Garden Thank you, Pam, for the bricks. Neighbors Bob and Donna had a sto...

Almost everything in our garden is junk.  Junk is good.  Junk is mostly free or very cheap.  Throw nothing away.  It can almost always be used for something else.  Our kitchen scraps become compost to feed the plants, banana peels are tossed into the hanging stag horn ferns.  We use water from a rain barrel.  We are not too proud to pick up neighbors trash.  Well, I'm a little shy about that, but I'll tell Wayne about the clay chiminea a neighbor has sitting out for trash collection and he trucks right down there to ask her if he can have it.  It had a chip out of the top.  It's just amazing what people will toss. We put the little chiminea out on the patio with an orchid sitting on top and a candle inside.  Someone else's discarded baker's rack is now a plant stand.  Orchids sit on an old chair. I've found lots of great ideas in Garden Decoration from Junk by Leeann MacKenzie.  One idea we've put to use is to hang old ...