Friday, June 15, 2007

Flowers, compost, patience, trees


I bought twelve of these bulbs, and they doubled in a year.
(Bonus for those who want to hear my voice; apology to any who didn't.)



Potatoes blossomed in the compost pile. They're beautiful flowers they just never sell at the florist's.

They're 3cm/1" or so across, and the middles look like the candy pumpkins they sell at Halloween (only teensy).



Here's my evidence of and recommendation for patience. I bought three bulbs for $5 in 1998. That seemed expensive. Day lilies. Now we have dozens of them and have moved them to several other places in the yard. In the first photo, three spots show—near the road, outside Marty's window, and between those in the back, the original spot in the side yard. The second photo is a close-up of that.

The gate to the right in the top photo is my neighbor's yard. The things hanging in the tree are bird feeders. We get mourning doves, sparrows and finches mostly. We have a finch sack hanging in the back yard, a cool nylon sock we fill with thistle seed. But that's another topic...

So for $5, and waiting nine years, we have many dozens of day lilies. And that big catalpa tree in the second picture (20 feet high now) was a baby seedling a foot high when we brought it here from our friend's front yard ten years ago.

The photo below is from the bottom up a month ago, when the leaves were only half size. It's a full canopy now, and higher than the house.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I still remember the creamy delicious flavor of a potatoe that I harvested from my compost heap about 19 years ago in Wollongong. I noticed this odd plant and pulled it up; lo and behold a nice plump spud came up on the root.
No flowers though.

Robyn L. Coburn