The Rocket's Red Glare

The lovely pigweed plant is back after re-seeding itself. The other splashes of color are red and blue salvia and white petunia. This holiday scene comes together thanks to the pigweed which looks like fireworks exploding!

All of this independence day decor is from my stock. 

This little guy has aged quite a bit due to the sun. If you click here, you can see how young and brown he used to look. I think it's time to purchase a new centerpiece for these celebrations. He usually comes out for July 4th and Memorial Day.

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Food Garden - Beginnings

This past weekend was packed with vegetables! June 16 was Fresh Veggie Day and June 17 was Eat Your Vegetables Day according to the Days of the Year calendar. In honor of that I'm finally ready to introduce my food garden to My Fairy Folks. I began my second venture into the food garden journey in January of this year. There's a lot to catch up on, so lets get started.

What a disaster zone!

I first cleared up all the old, dead plants. I zoned areas with cinder blocks and added new soil. (L to R) Ornamental cabbage, "Garden Salsa" pepper, (I'm not sure what this plant is because it's actually not there anymore), Jalafuego hot pepper, salvia, a dead thing I didn't want to give up on yet, red bell pepper and petunias. I've planted garden peppers before but they didn't do well due to lack of sun, so I'm hoping this second go-around will work out better for them. 

Off to the right of my cinder block area is this large container of salad variety. It includes romaine, red mustard and red leaf lettuce.

I have planted Swiss chard in the past but surprisingly had never noticed how purple the roots are! How beautiful.

I thought I'd put up a diagonal barrier to separate the chard and flowers.

This area looks cute and maintained for now. I really enjoy the addition of the ornamental cabbage. This gorgeous vegetation comes in a variety of colors including purple, pink, red and white. It's labeled "ornamental" because they have a very bitter taste and are typically only found on a plate as garnish. I chose white to allow the edible plants to grab the attention. The questioning plant (shown as an empty space in the photo above) didn't do well so I replaced it with mustard greens.

After only three weeks, we were ready to start picking lettuce from our own salad garden!

The butter lettuce (center with yellow flowers) grew very full and took up more room than I set aside for it. It was a surprise since I discovered it "hitchhiked" it's way into my garden, but I plan to get some more in the future because this stuff is so good! I'll be sure to show you some more photos from my growing food garden soon. Do you grow any edibles?

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Garden A Day Challenge - Day 7, Tea For Two

All accessories in this container garden came from my personal inventory. A quaint tea for two in a secluded bit of nature.

The yellow flowers on either side are Superbells and the middle is filled with Salvia. Both of these plants and the pebbles were purchased from Home Depot just for this garden.

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Garden A Day Challenge - Day 3, Salvaged by Salvia

For day three of the Garden A Day Challenge, I decided to breath new life into this small terra cotta pot. The Johnny Jump Up plants were half dead and being taken over by weeds so I decided to swoop in, clean up and salvage what I could.

Don't recognize the name "Johnny Jump Up"? That might be because this refers to a number of Viola species including Viola bicolor (American field pansy), Viola cornuta (tufted pansy), Viola pedunculata (California golden violet) and Viola tricolor (heartsease). This is not surprising considering that the Violaceae family has nearly 600 species in it, one of the most predominant being the Viola. Thank you, Wikipedia. 

I am a big fan of this plant and am happy to have been able to salvage a few bits.

A closer look at this garden is necessary to see the micro decorations. I typically use miniature items to decorate my fairy gardens but my son and daughter-in-law gifted a set of micro fairy garden accessories, a portion of which is shown in this scene. This discovery has certainly opened a new door of possibilities to me in my effort to continue to put my creativity to the test! The black pebbles are from the Dollar Tree and the sea glass was something I already had. 

What a lovely new home for my salvia plant purchased from Home Depot.

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Garden Revamp - Front Window, September 2015

Front Window, January 2015,
the "bare bones"

Cinder blocks are added as a border

September 2015
I begin my front window revamp
with the help of Mr. Peanut

Planned placement

In the back row are three purple Salvia plants (which hold up beautifully in the heat and drought of Southern California) and two Dwarf Fountain Grass 'Red Bunny Tails', both available at Home Depot.

The addition of bark will keep the soil moist. The colorful array of flowers in the cinderblocks were actually purchased at my local .99 store. Colorful flora doesn't have to break the bank folks.

This centerpiece ties the flowerbed together, all three colors of the flowerbed are represented in this potted plant, also found at Home Depot. It's still in the pot because this is not it's permanent home.

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