The vegetables in my back yard are not doing so well. My cucumber plants are drying up. I think they have a fungus or mildew. My tomato plant has bugs all over it. Yuck.
The search software on my phones picture app say that these bugs are leptoglossus zonatus bugs aka leaffooted bugs. The internet says they use their needle-like mouthparts to suck the juice out of plants – in this case my tomatoes. I’ve sprayed them with water, cut they keep coming back. I need to kill them I think …or just let them eat my tomatoes.
Every once in a while, I think about a rose that had a most amazing scent. The variety name is Jardins de Bagatelle. On Friday, I happened to do an internet search, and there happened to be these very roses available near someplace called Fillmore, CA. I searched for it, and it was only an hour and a half away! Yay! I went to get it. In the picture below, the blue dot in the upper left corner shows where I was.
The area around the nursery was agricultural. Lots of orange trees. It was so interesting:
The nursery itself was so cool. SO many roses! Wow! The only trouble was that it was a cool day, so the fragrance of the roses was a little blunted.
They had beautiful display gardens. There was even a pond! I will have a pond again some day. Some day…
There were many beautiful roses. This one was so dark!
There were also some interesting signs in the garden. I haven’t thought about this for many years. There was no such thing on Maui.
I drove home on the Pacific Coast Highway. Even though it was an overcast day, it was beautiful.
When I got home, I set the roses in the planter in front of my house. Yes, roses plural. Once I smelled such wonderful smelling roses, I had to get more. Besides my Jardins de Bagatelle, I also got April in Paris and Pope John Paul II.
The Jardins wasn’t blooming, so I couldn’t smell it. I’m glad I got some backups though, because last night I was looking on Bradaptation and found THIS post, where I say I found the variety a second time and wasn’t impressed. Ack!
I got some front porch pots a few days ago. I’ve been trying them in various positions to see what my favorite is. I finally got them just right, so I decided to put some plants in them.
I left the fiddle-leaf fig (the tall one) and the sanseveria (the spiky one) outside over the winter, and they survived, even with colder-than-usual temperatures, so I think they’ll be fine as outside plants.
I got the third plant (a schefflera triangularis) about a month ago. I kept it in its tiny pot, and have been worried about it drying out or suddenly dying. Now it has plenty of soil to spread its roots out. I can’t wait to see what it looks like as it grows bigger!
I think the whole arrangement looks like something you see at a mall, and I take perverse pleasure in that.
Today is our first day of school! Yay! I always feel so much better once I’m with the kids. Before that, it’s all meetings and papers and cleaning and thinking. Yuck.
I spent yesterday at school. I did less than I expected. I was already mostly ready. I just needed to straighten the room a little. I didn’t finish all the straightening, so there’s a little this morning before school. There’s nothing like that last shot of adrenaline before the kids come.
After I left school, I was a bundle of nerves, so I went to the local home discount store. Monday I had bought two hexagon flower pots, but didn’t get the third smaller one. The two pots looked stupid on my front porch by themselves, so I needed to get that third one. There was no time to waste! What if someone else bought it?
It was still there! I got it! Yay!
I like them. They’re made of cement. They’re weird and severe and artsy. And once I put plants in them, they will be glorious!
I decided not to go to school yesterday. It was my last-last day of summer. I thought about going on a field trip of some kind, but I decided to stay home and do a project. My palm trees have been looking really raggedy lately, so I decided to cut off the dead leaves.
The leaves were pretty easy to cut off, but putting them in the “green waste” bin was a little challenging. They have really big thorns on them:
The trees do look better though. Here’s a before and after:
I also weeded the garden bed the trees are in. There are weeds here I don’t recognize. I should learn them all. The most interesting one I saw yesterday was lacy and delicate, and when I pulled it, it smelled like… kerosene? It was fascinating.
When I came inside, I repotted my orchids. They have actively growing roots now, so now’s the time, and I’m not sure what kind of energy I’ll have once school starts.
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