Most everything survived winter of '17, which was January 6 - 8. Seriously, we had a hard freeze those three days, and that was it, winter was over.
We needed a little something for this little pot and Jeff picked out this purple flash ornamental pepper - it's so pretty! Just an annual, but hey, for four bucks, if it lives through the summer, the color enjoyment we'll get will be worth it.
My bougainvillea! We used to have these growing along our back fence at our house in California, but they don't live through the winter here in Texas, so I've always been reluctant to buy one. However life is too short to not have a beautiful blooming bougainvillea if that is your heart's desire, so we splurged and $18 later, here it is...and I know I'll love seeing it out my windows every day.
The front yard needed a lot of weeding in the beds, plus our oleander bushes froze; they are coming back, but all of the dead limbs needed to be cut off, so I did that. All I can say is thank goodness I bought myself some garden gloves recently, because I was a lot more willing to get into the dirt with them; somehow knowing that my skin will not have first contact with bugs and other crawling things made this a much more pleasant task.
We lost one plant - a lantana - in the front bed from the freeze, but really, I think it was almost dead beforehand - we'd had it in a pot in the backyard all summer, and it got root bound, so we replanted it into the front bed but it was too late. However, I've seen lantanas growing like crazy all over here, so we bought two more to see if we can't make them work this year:
See the one bit of greenery by itself? That's all that came back from last year's lantanas.
I love that this batch has three colors - the orange, yellow, and pink just drew me in!
I'm putting this shot in as a "before" shot to show how much the plant grows over the next few months.
This area needed work - I pulled out all of the pots, we weeded, and Jeff got the stones that the pots are sitting on back to being level. Then we put everything back and laid down new black mulch.
This plant - a dracena red sister, replaced one plant that had gotten really sticky and ugly, plus it mostly froze. I can see the pink leaves through the window while I'm sitting at my desk, and it makes me happy.
I think this is portulaca - honestly, I just loved the flowers, saw that it needed full sun, and boom - this empty pot had a new occupant! There is still one more empty pot just to the left of this plant that we need to fill, but we miscounted when we were at Lowe's, so came home one plant short.
Once we get that last pot filled, we can call this area finished - unless we find some more pots at a great price...then filling in with more color might be nice.
Here's the oleander that I cut down, and here's also where we ran out of mulch, darn it! I thought we had bought too much, but nope. Oh well, it was getting hot anyway so we were ready for a break. Soon enough, we'll get the rest of the mulch and THEN we'll really be done.
Is it weird that washed my garden gloves? They were really dirty! I kept them on my hands and used a bar of soap like I'd be washing my hands, only the gloves were cleaned. Then I set them outside to dry:
Hammock stand works quite nicely to air dry gloves!
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