Saturday, December 25, 2010

 

Merry White Christmas from Pittsburgh!

 I can't take credit for this- I copied it from my next door neighbor in Philadelphia.  I will reset the date on the camera before I take any more pics, I promise. 
 The Thanksgiving/Christmas Cactus peaked last week but it's great that it lasted till Christmas- there are ways to fool it into blooming later but it's too much trouble for me.
I didn't know Jade plants bloomed at all until a couple of years ago- I don't know if it's age or root crowding, or what but we've had this one at least 10 years.

By the way, my fellow stippled and striped daylily lovers should check out a new site by Loretta Zink, of Winchester, Ohio (central south Ohio).  http://www.loborose.com/ shows photos of many of her 50+ stipples and 7 stripes plus seedlings, with one new stripe, Plum Stripe, already introduced.  She's the only person I know that has Shattered, a 2006 Gayle Story stripe sold only one year before the originator stock was almost wiped out by flood then voles.  I have 16 stipples and 3 stripes, so I'm a small fish in the stipplestripe pond.  But my wife gave me "stipplestripe cash" for Christmas.

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Sunday, December 05, 2010

 

Daylilies Under their Winter Blanket in Pittsburgh

 I got about 2/3 of my thousand or so daylilies transplanted from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh before the freezing weather, and about half (100 or so) of my hostas.  If the old house isn't sold by May, I'll get a few more.  But the pool garden is essentially filled, as are the easy places to plant hostas.  The deer fence you see has only been broken down once so far, protecting the evergreen daylilies from the giant rats' browsing.  The deer actually did more damage trampling things with their cloven hooves than eating them.  The first line of defense was covering them with $1 wire wastebaskets and launtry baskets from the Dollar Store (you can see some still in place).  Cheap temp fence is 4 foot  welded wire to give strength, topped with netting to 7 feet, held up with clothespins on clothesline.  Gotta get a good "field fence" before spring, but this works for now.
 Didn't transfer my  golden Dawn Redwood (shown here) from Philadelphia; got another delivered to the hole in Verona for $200, probably saving thousands in back surgery.   The fence posts here are to prevent deer rubbing their antlers on the trunk, which almost killed it last year.
Wife Melanie turned left in front of another car (truck turning left from opposite direction blocked both their views), disabling the primary tow vehicle in early October.   She's recovering slower than the car, which was patched together by early November.   It delayed everything, but I got all my favorites.  Furniture didn't get moved though, so we're still living like campers, with two card tables in the dining room, and the patio set furnishing the living room.  I'm leaving for Philadelphia later today to get a load of bookshelves, etc.

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