Birthday at Work

We have birthday celebrations at work. I love to bake for them. A little while ago, I made this beauty.

Fruit Pizza

I forget who it was for, but it was for a production worker in the plant. He liked cheesecake and fruit. So I decided to do a fruit pizza. I got the recipe from allrecipes.com. It was a recipe with a 4 or 5 star rating. Great choice! Everyone liked it. I have 9 birthdays this month. I just may use this recipe again.

Take care.

Spring Flowers

Here are some of the flowers we had in our garden this spring. Here's another reason we were so busy.


Narcissus. As you can see, we have a lot of them. They just keep multiplying like crazy! I don't mind. When these come up, I know it's spring.

Narcissus

 Violas. Violas are planted in the Winter time, here. I thought people were nuts when I saw these in the Winter season. They take the frost and look dead. By noon, you'd never know they looked so bad. These even survived an ice storm! They are very forgiving of cold weather. As you see by the date tag, they were still going strong in mid-April. They don't usually last that long.

Violas

 Japanese Snowball Bush. This is a plant that I really love. It is beautiful in the Spring. Summer, Fall and Winter...so, so. It just looks like a regular bush. However, the leaves are serrated, deeply creviced and leathery. I can appreciate the leaves without the snowballs.

Japanese Snowball Bush

 Heirloom Rose. I forget the name of this one. I moved all of my roses out of a corner of the front yard that was being overtaken by poison ivy. This year was really a good year for this one. It must've needed a change of venue, more sun and new soil.

Heirloom Rose

 Mimosa. Here is my Mimosa tree in full bloom. Lovely, isn't it?

Mimosa with Daylilies

 Here's a close-up of the Mimosa flowers and leaves. It looks really delicate, but it takes a beating with our weather. The tree is getting a really nice canopy and is casting shade in the yard.

Mimosa Flowers

Here is a peach daylily that I purchased from one of those sales that pop-up in a field from time to time. I think I paid $3 for the pot a bunch of years ago. I've since divided it. I'll need to divide again. The other leaves surrounding it are from miniature yellow daylilies. Those will get divided this coming Spring, too.

Peach Daylily

 My garden by the back deck and parking lot. Foreground is a hybrid yarrow. It did really well this year, as you see. I have more patches around the yard. Lantana is the little pink flowers behind that. The lantana has since overtaken this whole area and the Yarrow died back a bit. Both of these flowers are really good for our climate. They take the heat and not much water. Butterflies, hummingbirds and hummingbird moths are really loving this right now. An Italian cypress is the bush behind. It is about 20 feet tall and 4 foot in diameter. Another climate forgiving plant for us.

Lantana and Yarrow

 Confederate Jasmine. This is a sickeningly sweet smelling vine. If the air is still and humid, you get a really big whiff of the fragrance as you pass by or sit nearby. It has a really pretty star-shaped flower and is very hardy. I have to cut it back every year otherwise it will grow into the willow tree to the left. It is doing just that, right now.

Confederate Jasmine

 One of my Frankenstein plants. This is a Rose Mallow, which is a member of the hibiscus family. It is also known as a Cottonbush because of the seedpods it makes after the flowers die and fall off. This will bloom clear into December, sometimes. The flowers last only one day. This plant started from seed and I put it where another Cottonbush died off. This year I noticed that it has red and pink flowers coming from the same plant, which is why I call it my Frankenstein plant. I love seeing plants sport like this. Two other Cottonbushes I have, which came from seed, have pink flowers only. Those are gorgeous, too.

Rose Mallow Sport

Now you have seen a bit of the flowers that I love to collect and grow.

Take care.

It's Been A Long While

It's been a long while since I posted last. What has kept us so busy is that we plant gardens in the Spring. This year, it seems they occupied our time more than usual. The problem is weeds. Lots and lots of weeds. Here in SC, we can have no weeds one day and the next day they start shooting up. I come home from work and pull some. Hubby, who is retired, pulls some during the day when he's not doing a chore or two. It's constant and unforgiving work. However, the upside is that we get veggies and fruit. Yeah!

First, let me say that we had a really wet Spring. We got a late start on planting and we didn't do too bad considering we couldn't plant when we wanted to. Some of the veggies couldn't recoup from the water and some died. That was our luck this year.

Here are some pics of what we started with this past Spring. I have a cage that I made for sweet potatoes. I didn't plant any this year, but I put my daikon seeds and a couple of potatoes that were sprouting in the house. I got only one daikon. The heat came and the rest bolted quickly. No potatoes. They died.

Daikon and Lonely Potato

 My hubby called this the "Indian Burial Ground". The teepees in the foreground are for pole beans. The teepees in the background are for cucumbers. The story here is our weather was really weird this year. We go rain and the cukes drowned, except for two plants. Those two plants gave us a few really nice cukes this summer. The pole beans, green beans and carrots were mowed down by rabbits in one night. They were only about 6" high and they were gone. Them pesky wabbits!

Indian Burial Ground

 Some of the best tools I own! Hubby had a broken rake that he was going to throw away. I asked if he would make me a 4-prong rake on a stick so I can get between plants. One day, he cut and welded and made these two. Boy can they yank weeds out of the ground with little effort!!!

Hubby's Hand Rakes

 Radishes and more radishes. I didn't think I'd get any because we have moles. The moles must not like radishes. We were grateful for these.

Radishes

 Here is one of our strawberry patches. We did really well this year with them. We had some slugs, rabbits, squirrels and birds getting to them. We managed to get about a pint to a quart every night when they started bearing. They bore clear into July. These are Ozark Beauty everbearers. Love them!

Ozark Beauty Strawberries

 My herb patch / nursery. Foreground large green patch is oregano. I harvested, dried and froze a lot for this Winter. Garlic chives looks like hair. This stays pretty much just like this all year 'round down here. Back right corner is thyme. I didn't get anything much from this this year. I don't use much thyme.

Herb Garden

More Radishes

We planted tomatoes, lettuce, yellow squash and mild banana peppers. The tomatoes are being scorched by the heat and the stinkbugs are mating and sucking the juice from them. Yuck! That really ruins the tomatoes. We got very little lettuce because of the heat scorching the leaves. The squash did well. The peppers are still bearing.

That was our Spring and Summer in our food garden.

Take care.