Front wood of flower press

Back wood of flower press

Years ago I had a flower press, but I have no idea what happened to it and it was small.  It could only do little teeny flowers.  So, I decided to make a new one, bigger and to my own specifications and more personalized.   I've been working on this flower press for the past 2 days.  I had some help from my husband.  He cut 2 pieces of wood for me and a bunch of cardboard the same size as the wood from some boxes.  I spray painted the wood yesterday after work.  I painted on piece pink and the other blue.  Today, I painted some flowers on the pieces of wood.  I pulled out some absorbent paper (2 sheets to go between each piece of cardboard).  Tomorrow, I'll drill a hole in each of the 4 corners.  In each hole, goes a screw that goes through all layers of wood, cardboard and paper and a wing nut fastener.    When I have those holes drilled, I can spray the clear fixative spray over my boards to protect the flower paintings.  The idea is to use the wing nut screws to tighten the flower press over the flowers to dry them out and press them.  If you need step by step instructions, here is a good website to help you.  http://www.ehow.com/how_2069305_make-flower-press.html

Teddy Bear Sunflowers

High Scent Sweet Peas

So seeding this year has been a dismal failure except of course the darn beans that the whiteflies feasted on.    Those are now safely protected with those yellow cards with icky, sticky stuffy on the outsides that reminds me of rubber cement.  But it's a little too late.  Close the barn door after all the horses have escaped except the ugly old hags that are only good for eating your oats.  They've become our friends so we keep them around and talk to them and feed them because we consider them family.  :)  So, this meant it was time for a visit to Burpee Seed Company's website.  I chose Burpee because they've been around forever and cater to the home gardener and I believe them when they say they are not in the pockets of the GMO monsters like Monsanto. What did we get?  

Sweet Basil

Common Chives

Double Curled Parsley

Bushsteak Hybrid Tomato

Old Spice Mix Sweet Peas

Hopefully, we'll have some good luck with these seeds when they come.  I saw an interesting planter for sweet peas that I want to try.  It's just a basket with a bunch of bamboo-like supports for the sweet peas to climb up.  It's not much to look at in the beginning, but I bet it's gorgeous once it has a blooming plant growing all over it.  I'm just tickled about sweet peas because I love fragrant plants.  For about 3 weeks while I was walking my dog, there was a fragrance that had my nose leading me all over the place trying to find this scent that was so wonderful I just HAD to find it.  Every day, twice a day I was hunting and hunting trying to find the plant that owned the aroma.  The dog just couldn't understand why I was acting like a dog, sniffing here and there, up and down.  The neighbors must have thought I'd lost my marbles.  I never did find the source of the scent so I expect next spring I'll go through it all again.  As always, before planting these seeds I looked it up.

 

The directions said to plant in November or early spring.  We'll plant them right away when they get here.  I also noticed that it was recommended to nick the hard outer coating with nail clippers to get more of the seeds to germinate.  Be careful to nick only the outer coating and not the seed though.  My daughter soaks her seeds overnight before she plants them.  I'm not sure how that would work with these.  I might try that with some of these as an experiment and see which works better.  These seeds are planted the old fashioned way; make a furrow and put the seeds in the furrow.  Then, cover the seeds.  Remember we talked about gardenias? They like acidic soil.  These are opposite.  These like alkaline soil.  Sweet peas take 3 - 4 weeks to germinate my friends so be patient.  Be sure to give them something to climb up and protect those seedlings from birds, snails and other predators.  Morning sun and afternoon shade suits these flowers to a tea!  As they grow, be very gentle when training them up their trellis or whatever they are growing up, the stems can break easily.  Like all other blooming plants that we love to talk about lately, deadheading is necessary.  Remove those spent blossoms if you want new ones and unlike petunias, don't wait until they are all the way dead, do the dead heading just as the blossom is beginning to fade for the best results.  It is said that the more flowers you cut off the plant for bringing inside to enjoy, the more the plant will produce.  So remember to enjoy some of these blooms inside your home too.  
As always, I want to share a couple of wonderful sites for sweet peas reference that helped me.
http://www.selectseeds.com/sweet_peas05.htm
http://www.reneesgarden.com/articles/swp-direct-tips.html

Glorious Geranium Blossoms leftover from last year 3/28/2012

I just love geraniums.  They are a simple flower that bloom from spring through the end of summer.  There seems to be very little that can go wrong with them.  They are somewhat drought tolerant so even if you forget to water them once in awhile, they forgive you.  They are like your children and if you do too much, they rebel and act up.  So too much water and the roots will rot.   Geraniums need to be dead headed to get them to continuously bloom.  If the spent blooms are not removed, then new blossoms will not come and the plant may go to seed.  There are two different fertilizers recommended for geraniums - use either 20-20-20 or 15-30-15 formulas.  As always, when fertilizing, water after applying the fertilizer to avoid burning the plant.  Clay soils need to be improved with organic matter so your geraniums will thrive.  The flowers do well in containers, planted in the ground or brought inside for the winter.  If planted directly in the ground, they prefer a shallow planting rather than deeply planted.  I've been very lucky and had the same plants for several years.  There are 3 main methods of overwintering geraniums.  

1. Hang bare roots upside down in cool place (45-50°Fahrenheit or 7.5-10°Celsius)
2. Bring the plants inside as house plants
3. Using a sharp knife or pruners take a 3-4 inch cutting, pinch off lower leaves, dip in rooting hormone and stick in a mixture of coarse sand and sphagnum peat moss

Here are a couple sites to help you with Geranium Care:

http://www.weekendgardener.net/perennial-flowers/overwintering-geranium-110811.htm

http://www.uri.edu/ce/factsheets/sheets/geraniums.html

http://askville.amazon.com/Geranium-Care/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=2489628

Whitefly update: The bean plants are tanking.  I've completely lost 3 plants entirely.  Shown here are 2 more that I don't expect to recover.  I've been treating the plants since Friday with spray and each day I inspect, I continue to see whiteflies on the undersides of the leaves.  I ordered some whitefly strips from amazon.com.  In the beginning I was really upset, but as I thought about this I decided that the beans took only a week to really start growing.  I can grow some more bean pretty quickly so I need to stop whining and just wait for silly, yellow strips and then get rid of the insects and grow some more beans.  Hopefully the strips will get here soon because I see they are attacking the really healthy bean plants too now.  Notice the curling of the leaves.  When I saw the wilting leaves, I knew.  It was confirmed when I turned the leaf over and saw all the little white buggers just hanging around having a little tea party without me.

Lessons Learned: 

1. Do not put newly bought houseplants near your garden plants.  
2. Always keep whitefly/aphid strips on hand so you don't have to wait for them to be shipped

I didn't want to just complain tonight so I thought I'd share a cool little ornament terrarium I found at Save-On crafts.  Naturally, this is not what they advertised
it as.  You can find it here.  I used it for air plants and orchids.  Another cool glass piece I love for showing off single cut flowers is a flower shaped vase.  It typically is used for a hibiscus flower but I use for any flower I see blooming that I find.  It's always nice to see what others use to display their garden showpieces.  Getting ideas is part of what blogging is all about after all.  Finally, that little orchid that I got as a free bonus for purchasing 3 plants from Orchid Master that I told you about last week?  It has 2 blooms!  I was soooo tickled!  It almost made up for those wicked whitflies.  ALMOST, but not quite.

New Orchid - Notice 2 Buds Baby!!

Today I tried to make that living wreath following the instructions on their website.  Well, let me tell you what... what a pain in the neck!  If the plants live through the stress, I'm not sure if the gardener will.  The first attempt I tried I didn't realize it was a failure until I got to nearly the end.  It was the point where I was supposed to put the second metal frame on and squeeze all the beautiful flowers through the wires without killing the flowers or breaking them that I realized that it just wasn't going to work.   About then, I decided to reconstruct things a bit differently and work smarter not harder.   I have a double front door, so I needed to make 2 of these.  I took some photos all along the way so I could show you how it looks when an amateur does it.  Just the same, I'll leave mine in the back for a few days and see if the plants die before I hang them on the front door.  I'm not as confident in my abilities as I used to be.

Let's start with your supply list. 

• 2 wire wreath frames or 1 wreath frame cage per wreath
• sheet moss (lots)
• soil with time release fertilizer mixed in
• flowers for wreath (consider location wreath will be in)
• plant wire (lots)

(Note: the completed wreath shown is the failure) 

Step 1

Take the sheet moss and line the wreath form with the prettier, green side facing out.  Be sure to leave no holes that the soil can escape through.  Take the time to be choosy about your sheet moss used.

Line wreath with sheet moss

Step 2

Place the soil and fertilizer you mixed together in the center of the moss in the wreath frame being careful not to put so much that it will leak out make a big mess.  Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and wasted a lot of time on clean up.  

Add soil with fertilizer to wreath

Step 3

Add the top cover of sheet moss with the pretty side up.  Be sure to completely cover AND contain the soil.  You may want to roll up the sides of the moss a bit to ensure the soil does not come out and then add the wire wreath cage cover (if it's that type you are using) or put a second wire wreath frame on top of the moss and fasten with floral wire.

Step 4

Poke holes for your flowers and "plant" them into your moss wreath.  Pack sheet moss around the newly planted flowers to ensure the plants and soil stay in place.  Use floral picks to gently direct flowers to grow in the direction wanted and stay in place.  Spray with a gentle hose or spray bottle filled with water that is uncontaminated.

Finish wreath with  Verbena, Petunia, & Torenia

Whiteflies eat bean plants! YIKES!

Whitefly Infestation

Whitefly Invasion!  Yep. Yesterday afternoon I did my walk about and I saw something was eating the leaves of my bean plants.  But, there was another sign.  The leaves looked wilted.  Do you see in the photo above how the leave is sagging and bent over itself a bit?  Those two things together show me the plant is in distress.  I needed to inspect the plant more closely and the first place I look is hiding places.  I looked at the undersides of the leaves and I saw little white bugs.  Now don't go thinking I'm some expert on garden bugs.   I work a real job during the week just like everyone else and from 6 pm to dark Monday through Friday and on  Saturday and Sunday, I try to squeeze in gardening, canning, painting, scrap-booking and every other kind of crazy hobby I come up with for that week.  Gardening and cooking are my constants and I have been sewing since I was in junior high.  But back to the bugs. 

Close up of  Whiteflies

 I saw the bugs and I immediately did what I always do when I see bugs of any kind on my plants - filled a spray bottle with warm water and dish soap and sprayed the entire plant top to bottom tops and undersides of leaves, stems and even the soil for every bean plant that shown any sign of the white bugs.  I took photos before the treatment and expanded the photos so I see a close up of the insects since my eyesight is not good enough to get a microscopic view or close up enough to identify them.  I was able to identify the infestation as whitefly with the help of the internet and photos.  While no one said to treat with the soapy water spray, it really worked wonders!  While my leaves didn't care for it much, neither did the insects and nearly all of the whiteflies flew the coop.  We had only a couple of the insects return the following day and I sprayed again.  I was not able to get a regular insecticide until Saturday night because I had my grandsons spend the night on Friday night as I was the babysitter on Saturday.  I'm not unhappy with my response nor my results, but tomorrow I'll use the commercial spray and hopefully eradicate them for good.  I want to point out why these daily walk arounds are so important.  While I was reading up on these insects, one man said that his entire sunflower planting was decimated by whiteflies in 18 hours.  This means that just skipping one day of walking around your garden/yard, you miss the opportunity of catching this kind of problem and maybe losing all of what you planted of a single species of crop.  It was only a matter of a few hours for this to spread to all of my bean plants and they are spread all across the various corners of my lanai.  This is just a little something to consider the next time you decide you're too tired or too lazy to stroll around the yard to check up on your garden.

Gardeners Welcome

SC92 Orchid Plant Pot Shin Shiang Diamond 'Sun #1'

The orchids arrived today.  With the 3 that I ordered came a free one.  I giggled to myself because a free orchid means that it comes in a smaller pot.  We know this and we expect it.    We also expect that the plant will be substantially smaller and the pot will be substantially smaller because it is free.  Well, the pot was a tiny bit smaller, not a lot.  The plant, believe it or not was actually the same size, if not a teeny bit bigger.  It made me a smile.  I looked the plant up and I decided to share a photo with you of what the orchid looked like. I was more than pleasantly surprised.  The arrival of orchids is always a time of excitement and fun.  I was really glad that I had thought to get the supplies the other day because they were on hand when I needed them.  Buying premixed orchid plant media is very expensive, so I always mix my own.  Each type of orchid has a preference of what they like best.  As a general rule, I typically use mostly orchid bark and moss and for some I use charcoal.  Today, the mixture was moss and bark.

how repotted orchid looks with clips

free orchid

I mix the moss and bark together in an old plastic washtub (dry) and then add water to cover and let it soak for for about 15 minutes or so.  This is a messy job so this is best done outside.  The orchids prefer to be a little cramped but not claustrophobic, if that makes sense.  Never, ever bury the rhizomes or base of the plant with the planting media (bark, moss or charcoal).  If the plant media is not packed in well enough to keep the orchid sturdy, give it a stick and a couple clamps to make it secure.  If an orchid does not have a secure base from the very beginning, it will not grow secure roots and it will wither.  You will be fighting from the very beginning to keep the orchid blooming and flourishing.  

Sick Pentas 3/22/2012

Chinese Lilies

We aren't all about orchids today... I found a sad plant today.  My pentas was doing fine until about a week ago.  This is not a new plant.  It's about 3 or 4 years old now.  I understand that most people treat these as annuals and buy a flat of them and plant them to die at the end of the autumn.  Here, that doesn't happen if you are lucky.  Anyway...they were coming back just great until about a week ago and then they started looking rather peeked.  You can see they look sort of faded green or gray-green.  We'll continue to keep an eye on these guys over the coming days to see how things turn out.  We've had afternoon showers for the past two days and that may be just what the doctor ordered.  On the positive side, the Chinese Lilies are bursting with joy!  The couple of days of spring rain has worked magic with them.  I wish they'd hurry up and bloom!  The front looks absolutely beautiful with the flowers planted and the little hummingbird glass.