Grow Your Own!

Used to be everyone grew a few tomatoes and cucumbers for the summer. You get a big 5 gallon bucket and set it in the sun or on a porch. Every house had a few flowers to pick and bring in. Neighbors traded vegetables at weekends. Americans have become addicted to whats easy and fast. They don't even go to the trouble to know neighbors!  Our addiction to cell phones, television and video games has destroyed our need for other people.  We don't go to a ballgame we watch it from home and eat snacks! We don't pay attention to each other we'd rather LOL them on our phones If you go to a coffee house you'll notice it's silent now because people are too busy doing social media instead of being social! Now the Fourth of July is upon us I issue this challenge...
Here is a list of what you'll need...2 five gallon buckets, a bag of miracle grow garden soil, some gravel and a drill. Drill 5 holes in the bottom of the bucket put in about three inches of gravel. Then add the soil. Now go to and buy some of those big tomato and cucumber plants and out them into your buckets! Now put them out in the light and feel your life get better!

Happy Fourth of July Everyone!

Plots, Pans and Garbage Pails

I have been plotting for most of the spring to get these iris into something other than a bright blue Kiddie pool. They were given to me by a lady who bought them and then found out her ground was mostly tree roots. We managed to get them home and drag them under the grape arbor...then we collapsed for the sheer weight of moving them! I have made plots and put things in pans, garbage pails but never a kiddie pool! I choose to dig when it's damp for red clay because though it is heavy as crap and dense you can dig and it holds it's shape like a clay pot...you just have to make sure you make a way for the water to get out or it'll drown your plants. Just like a pot with no hole in the bottom!
I have this thing about iris...they seduce me every time I see one. J and I have bought Denim blue, Damask purples, Immortality white, as well as inherited palest apricot from my grandmothers.  Now we are searching for a black iris called Old Black Magic which is a re blooming iris! So here are the pics of whats blooming for the week...Blessings and prayers!

Immortality Iris....The story of forever.

I am a plant addict. There, I said it. No intervention needed! 

I love the smell of freshly cut grass, deep down to the brown, red & black earth and the feel of it between my fingers. I love hearing stories about plants. There is lore and fact, and sometimes they intermingle. I love sitting out in my garden, listening to the birds sing; viewing it as art, like, a great masterpiece, and the work yet undone. 

The story of iris flowers began when Egypt conquered Syria, King Thutmose III of Egypt was a gardener and a warrior as well. He assured that the iris flower would be on his monuments, Temple of Amon at Karnak, as well as in the gardens of Egypt, they all bear the iris design, and are the symbol for life renewed. 

The white iris was created by Dr. Lloyd Zurbrigg, circa 1991,  which is known today as the Immortality Iris, which blooms in the Spring and in the Fall, which is unusual for an iris. It's has been called a true remembrance of this remarkable man.  I love to think of it as a little chunk of his own immortality.

Read more:

  {This photo was taken two weeks later}

I have been promised the re-blooming will go on for perhaps as long as 6 weeks! 

History of the Iris Flower | Garden Guides

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