I have a mango!

Last week Carlos and I went to Excalibur Trees and got a mango and a mulberry bush. I can't wait to go back and buy more stuff. I started a cutting of the mulberry immediately and I hope it will take. Tony from GardenWeb told me he had success with cuttings. I tasted my first ripe mulberry and it was delicious. I hope the birds will leave it alone. It should have more berries tomorrow.

In the morning I put the mango on the ground. I hope I put it in a good place. I was thinking that I had planted the banana trees in an area that got a lot of damage from hurricane Wilma. The stuff on the north side of the house did much better. I put the mango on the north side but it is not protected by the house because it is far away from the wall. Well, I hope it will grow well and I will try to protect it as much as possible.

I also put the Telosma cordata on the ground, right next to the swing set. The swing set is starting to rot so I am sure we will have to replace it. I put cord on one of the posts and trained the vines.

I need to propagate the bulbine. I love it!

More work

This week I was able to work in the garden in the afternoon. It has been raining and it has been cloudy so I took advantage of that. I planted the 3 small cotton plants I got from Misti and her husband. I also moved the Rudbeckia (sp?) next to the milkweed. The plants in that side of the garden are orange/yellow and look good. I also planted more okra seedlings in the bed with the other ones. Only one is growing tall, the other 2 are smaller. I have seedlings for Red Malabar Spinach and I will put them in the other vegetable bed.

I put more mulch around the beds. I finally connected the new bed with the one that has the 3 queen palm trees. I still have to do a lot but little by little I am doing it.

This morning I worked on the back beds, next to the pool screened. I trimmed most of the plants and cleaned around them. I got two bags of cuttings.

We saw 3 types of butterflies and 3 or 4 different moths. One was a Gulf Fritillary and it almost landed on Carlos and Titi, it kept flying around us. It was much prettier than the pictures I have seen on the internet. Orange in one side and brown, orange and red on the other. Most of the pictures only show orange and brown. We also saw a Yellow Sulphur and a Zebra Longwing. People were saying that they had not seen Zebras since last year's hurricanes. I guess they are back.

This weekend

I was not able to work in the garden on Saturday but today I put 4 bags of mulch on the bed by the corner, next to the palm tree. I planted a couple more bulbs, I think they are crinum ginger and put mulch around them. I used almost all the cardboard I got on Saturday. I need more.

What's blooming in the garden in July

The orange orchid is still blooming! It is such a pretty plant. I need to get more.

One of the gingers is blooming now. It smells great and I love the flowers but the plant doesn't look good. Most of the leaves are leaning. I got another flower in the gerbera daisy. It has grown lot. The duranta erecta is not blooming as much as other years. It has some kind of insect making nests (webs) in most of the branches. I sprayed them with water and hope it is going to help. The ixoras have the same problem. The flowers get brown and die.

Fish emulsion

The garden was pretty stinky for a couple of days. I got a bottle of fish emulsion and used it in most of the plants. It was a lot of work because I needed to dilute it in water so I walked back and forth from the kitchen to the garden. My hands were smelly for a long time too. It is an organic fertilizer and I am hoping it is going to help the plants. We need to fertilize the grass, we got a letter from the homeowners association, but we are going to have to use regular fertilizer. I need to find something organic.

Getting rid of grass

After seeing the movie The Inconvenient Truth, I decided I needed to really get rid of most of our grass. I know Don won't like it much and he won't help at all but I need to do at least something. It is cut by a gas lawn mower and I have read they pollute the air much more than a car. I cannot stop driving since there is no public transportation around here but I can try to limit the amount of grass we have. My problem is that I am always running out of cardboard or paper or mulch. I has been raining a lot also so it has been difficult going outside. This morning I finally did something.

We got our first Queen butterfly. I found the caterpillar outside and brougth it inside. It was the one that looks like a Monarch caterpillar but this one has 3 sets of horns. The chrysalids was smaller and we thought it had died because it became totally black the day before. The butterfly is so pretty. It is smaller, similar to the Monarch but much darker.