I know zip dot squat about flower arranging, but I stuffed a bunch of Irises and Lilies in this vase with various flourishes. I think it looks okay except for the giant bloom in the corner there. If these are not Irises and Lilies, fell free to correct me.



My buddy Sneedlet One came over yesterday and will be staying until Sunday morning. His mother went out of town for the weekend. I picked him up at his preschool yesterday afternoon. We are having so much fun (rolls eyes).

Cool weather has arrived here in the desert. The highs are in the low nineties and upper eighties, but more importantly, the overnight lows are in the sixties. We have a wider difference between the daytime highs and the nighttime lows, than most places do.

Someone in the newspaper wrote the other day that our difference in temps is about thirty degrees, day to night, regardless of the season. That is a bit of a stretch, but it is a solid twenty-five degree difference. I suspect that before the urbanization of our area, the difference was greater.

My plants all look great, except for a few annuals on the downside of their life cycle. The cooler weather is fabulous for growing.



One thing I learned in my gardening class is that there is more than one way to root a plant. I am accustomed to rooting cuttings, although some plants are easier to root this way than others. My Sweet Potato vines will root in water by simply cutting off a shoot and plunking it in a container of water. Most things won't root that way.

The method in this picture is called layering and essentially means allowing the plant to contact a rooting medium, such as potting soil. I bent over a long shoot of a Lantana, into a clean pot, covered the branch with soil and held it down with a rock. Hopefully, roots will develop in the branch where it contacts the soil and I can sever the branch from the mother plant, creating another plant.

If you have ever grown a Spider plant, you have seen this technique occur naturally. I damaged the plant by removing the leaves in the area I hope will root, to cause the plant to grow roots where it normally would not.











Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky