Recently in Random thoughts Category

Seeing how I'm sort of playing catch-up here I thought I would share a few photos from the post-freeze clean-up.  To recap, the winter of 2009 was said to be the worst ever here in Central Florida.  I had planned to build a large shade house last fall to protect my brugs, but was not able to do so.  I relied on frost cloth, plastic sheeting, and an endless supply of water to protect my brugs.  The damage was great and I estimate that I lost about 30% of my plants.

Here's a photo from early spring after I had cut back many of my larger brugmansia seedlings to the ground.


I was excited to see many of the plants sprouting new growth shortly after I did my pruning.  Before the month-long clean-up process was over i ended up with several large piles of dead brug cuttings like the one below. 


I also learned to be very careful when handling large quantities of brugmansia branches.  When I was cleaning up this mess the temps were near 80 so I opted to work shirtless and in shorts....BIG MISTAKE! At the time many of the branches were still oozing out sap and of course I got completely coated with the stuff.  By the end of the day I was not feeling well and it took me almost a week to feel normal again.  I handle brugs all the time and have never had this happen before, even when I spend a day taking fresh cutting to propagate.  I'm sure it was just the result of me be glazed over by all the sap.

Rather than burn the piles as I have done in the past, I'm letting them decompose to avoid potential dangers from clouds of burning brugmansia smoke.

I will have my shadehouse and greenhouse built by this fall so i hope to never see piles of dead brugs like this again!

No I didn't give up blogging, I just had to focus my energy on a couple of other web projects this spring.  While both are still a work in progress, I now have time to get back up to speed with things here.  Also motivating me to post is that the brugs that survived the freeze are rebounding nicely.  I have had a bunch of blooms appear this past month and have been able to get a couple dozen seed pods to set with hopefully more to come.  I made over 50 additional crosses since last week, but with afternoon temps hovering around 90, I'm not sure how many will take.

Anyways, I'm excited to be back!

While everyone knows of the Blue Bird of happiness, well I've encountered the Blue Jay of happiness.  This cutie has been hanging out in a group of my older brugmansia seedlings for a couple of weeks now.  It tends to hang out near me when I'm out there and as you can see, it does not seem to be afraid either.  Could this be love???

While I was home for lunch today I managed to capture a photo of the space shuttle launch.  Here it is taking off over the horizon.

Even though I'm smack dab in the center of the state, shuttle launches are still dramatic.

I would like to welcome my new blog readers that came over from Blotanical.com.  Thanks for the nice comments.  Please visit often to see what surprises my hybridizing efforts produce.

I had a major event over the weekend so I missed a couple of days of new bloom pictures.  I'll make uip for it this week by posting a few extras.  I'm heading out now to see what is blooming this morning.

Just before dusk tonight I spotted this rainbow illuminating the sunset lit sky.   The real pot of gold at the end of this rainbow is the cool weather that is moving in on Saturday.

After several year's of relatively mild winters, the dark side of mother surfaced again this month.  In January we had a hard freeze that brought temperatures down to the mid 20's for a couple of days.  Now, just a few weeks later we are back in Mother Nature's deep freeze.  All I can say is that I hate cold weather!!!!!!!!   I know this is going to be a major setback to my hybridizing program.  My motto in times of crisis has always been, "deal with it and move on", and that's what I will do. 

I knew going into winter I would be gambling with the weather.  I was betting on another mild winter, and I lost my bet.  Hey, were in a period of global warming, winters are supposed to be warmer than usual, right?  I had planned to build a shade structure last fall to protect my plants, but time was not on my side.  It did not help that I grew many more seedlings that I had planned. I know being a pack rat contributed to that.  When more seeds than expected germinated from a cross, I planted them all rather just plant 20-30 seedlings as a trial.  That will change this year for sure.

Now the waiting game begins to see how many seedlings recover.  To keep myself from getting too bummed about this, I remind myself that even if I lost 2,000 seedlings to the back to back freezes, I have over 6,000 more that survived and may be blooming this year!

There's a reason why my garden blog has become stagnant, it's called too much nice weather!  When the weather's nice outside, I spend all my free time working on my plants. Then when I'm done I'm too tired to blog.  I figure I have just under 9,000 brugmansia seedlings growing now.  I'm not sure why I let this number get so out of control, but every time I have a seedling bloom that is a potential keeper it makes it all worthwhile.

I have lots of notes and pictures to share in the new year so please stay tuned.  I hope to have my new website up by mid-January followed by my online store in early February.  So if you are looking to purchase some Angel Trumpets, check back soon.

Now I just need some cold and rainy weather to keep my indoors and force me to work on the website....

I returned from a two day road trip to find a dead catfish in my driveway.  It looked to me to be about a 3-4 pounder and had most likely only been there for a half day.  How on earth does a catfish end up in your driveway????  Were aliens responsible?  Does this have some deep meaning behind it?  

I'm used to finding dead animals in my yard, but never fish.  Both my dog and cat enjoy hunting.  For my dog she's usually responsible for a few possum, rabbit and field rat deaths each year.  My cat focuses on birds, reptiles, and rodents.

There are plenty of fish close by too.  Lake Minneola is a couple hundred feet to the west and on the east side of my house there is a small pond about 500 hundred feet away.  That would most likely be the source because it is slowly drying up as the result of our drought and is a more likely place to find catfish than Lake Minneola.

After inspecting the catfish I could find no signs of an animal attack.  I doubt either one of my pets were responsible so I was thinking maybe one of the local hawks or Ospreys may have inadvertently dropped it while buzzing overhead.  But after closer inspection I could not find any wounds that may have resulted from being clutched by a bird.

So that leaves one possibility, it is a walking catfish.  I've seen pictures of them, but have never seen one in real life.  I know they have established themselves throughout Florida and I've seen video footage of them on our local TV stations.  I scoured the web for pictures and after reviewing dozens of photos, my mystery fish does resemble a walking catfish.  Unfortunately I've already buried the fish so I can't do a close comparison.

This will certainly make it easier for me to fish for fresh fish.  I can work in my yard and still fish.  How cool is that  when fish walk right up to your back door!

This weekend I continued to clean-up my brugmansia seedling collection.  I decided to let the plants in one gallon pots stay in their original pots rather then up size them to larger ones. Most are rooted in the ground so they have the stability they need to stay upright.  Another group of younger gallon size plants had been attacked by caterpillars so I removed the damaged leaves and spaced the plants out.

For my major weekend project I opted to move my larger 3 inch potted seedlings up to 4 1/2 deep pots for the winter. I also gave them a dose of timed release fertilizer, something I may regret if we have a cold winter.  At last count I believe I moved up just over 500 seedlings.  Within the next week I'll zap them with some growth regulator to help keep them compact as they mature.

I spent about half the weekend bending over and now my back is telling me how displeased it is with me.  Oh to be young again....