A month? A month! A month since my last post, give or take. Things get out of hand quickly as the end of my work season and the end of my farming season both close in on me. Inevitably, some things end up getting neglected, and first on the chopping block is this blog. Though I do not call or write, you still remain in my thoughts, and I've been doing some prep work for posts. That means I should be able to fulfill those promises I've been making of 'future posts' over the coming months, as I slip comfortably into my layoff season and begin enjoying my 'free' time.
One of them, a post about using excess milled lumber, has already been posted to the Build-It community, and can be found here.
For the return to my own blog, I'll start with an indulgent post about our indoor plants. All of these get moved outdoors onto my spacious deck after the last frost, and come back inside sometime around the first frost. This turns our home into a real jungle for the winter months, which suits us just fine.
In the picture below, the petunias will stay out, and I'll try to collect some seeds from them. The sage will be moved to a smaller pot and brought inside. We haven't had great luck with sage, and will probably try to start some cutting from this one. At about 5 o'clock in the pot, you can see the tiny remains of a nasturtium that we had hoped to harvest some flowers and seeds from, but the chickens kept eating it as fast as it could grow.
Forgive me for mixing tenses in this post. When I say what will be done to these plants, it already happened about a month ago. From the picture below, we dug out the thyme and split it into a couple smaller pots. Thyme is another herb that we would like a lot more of, but have struggled to find the perfect spot.
We have a lot of these spider plants now. I intend to take a few to the indoor flea market this winter, along with clones of several of the plants featured in this post. We have a hard time throwing away perfectly healthy plants, even when they're just trimmings, so we have a lot of baby plants now that we're quickly running out of room for.
The poor bird of paradise had a rough summer; it was quite a bit drier that it would have liked. I am happy to report that it has since recovered nicely, and already has a new, shorter leaf stem.
The strange looking flowers below belong to one of the aloe-looking succulents seen at the bottom left of the picture. Every summer a couple of them will flower outdoors, and then the others will flower inside over the winter.
This bunny ears cactus is a mother plant that we've had for several years now. The dish that it's in doesn't have drain holes, making it difficult to give this one the proper amount of water. Instead of repotting it like reasonable people, we keep resurrecting it and finding new pots for the resulting prickly explosion of baby plants.
Below we have a 'mother' aloe plant that started in similar situation to the cactus. I was able to drill a hole in this pot, and we've repotted this one several times, but it just keeps making babies, so we keep planting them too. We don't mind, there's no such thing as too much aloe.
My onion vine was started from a tiny bulb no larger than a pea, taken from a plant my father had for years. Although it doesn't look like much right now, it had about 7' of vine trailing behind it when it came out this spring. When it's super happy, it will grow about half a foot a day.
I have many more plants to show you, but I'm having some real problems adding pictures right now, and I don't want to lose everything I've done so far. I'll come back to this one with a part two, I promise ;)
It's good to be back, hope to see you all again real soon.