Friday Slideshow – 10 Aug, ’07

Sorry for the delay in uploading this one, and it’s done in a hurry too. My family are just back and Frances is now officially Mother Christmas! She brought back with her a lot of seed packets, a buddleja, two Wisterias (white and purple), a white Passiflora and a Virginia creeper and all of those of course need homes.. so Arif and I put up 3 new trellises to receive the new members of the garden and there is quite a lot of work yet to be done..

It’s 7:30pm almost and I’ve just come in the house after being out for most of the day.

What can I say guys… power tools, plants, gardening and getting dirty all in one day, and I didn’t even have to pay for this much fun! (I know, this is obscene :twisted:)

Now I’m off to the pool…

I hope you have had, or are having a wonderful weekend my friends.

Cheers!

Comments

  1. underthepalmtree

    I think it is alot of fun that all of your family is getting involved with gardening! You all can share in the joy of it! Sounds like you have some work ahead of you today, stay cool, wear hats and SUNSCREEN!

    Loved the slideshow and I ALWAYs love buddah-bar!

    I am having alot of fun catching up on posts, in particular Katching…Steve-IBN-Reasonable Man.

    Oh guess what….I sliced part of the trunk of my fav plumeria with a weedwacker by accident, do you think it will just repair itself? You can answer me when you have time in Mahmood Talk.

    Kind Regards…

  2. Abdulkarim

    I only have a small garden but I bet any reader to have had the joy I had recently of my garden.

    Readers may not beleive it but I had a peacock in my garden! Yes a large living peacock landed in my garden and refused to fly away. Instead it claimed my garden as hers and roamed it freely. Now is there anybody out there who had a peacock as a guest?

  3. Post
    Author
    mahmood

    Plumerias are really tough plants. I drove a 2″x2″ stake into one of my plumerias roots so that I can pull it back as it was going rather awry, in the process I did hear a loud CRACK signifying that the trunk broke off the root, I swear to you this is what happened as the plant was very wishy washy afterward. I stopped, secured the plant to the stake, stuffed some sand forcefully through the hole that resulted from my pulling the plant back and now – just 4 or 5 months after that incident – it is flowering again. You might have seen a couple of shots of it’s beautiful red flowers in my Flickr account. So don’t fret, I think it should survive.

    Abdulkarim, my dad – rest his soul – used to have an aviary and he had every kind of bird imaginabe; a pair of those were peacocks and that was in a house that can’t have been bigger than about 30 foot x 30 foot!

    But although they are lovely to look at, and they do guard the place they’re in, they are noisy beasts!

    Must be an experience having it in your garden.

  4. Abdulkarim

    Yes Mahmood they are noizy birds but they love to be around near to humans once they get used to them. In fact “ours” got carried away in her joy that she alarmed one of the neighbours who turned up claiming she was his. Well I had no choice but to let them take her. The good thing it took them about 5 or 6 days of almost desparate attempts to catch her and then they only managed to do that after they brought in an army of men armed with all sorts of nets. It was a great experience. I would very recommend it to all your readers to have lots of trees around. You never know! A peacock may take refuge in your garden too.

  5. barry

    Mahmood: Great slideshow as always. I hope your wisteria don’t take down their trellises. Usually here, Arbors are necessary as they get rather big and quite heavy. There’s a HUGE one planted over 100 years ago in Sierra Madre in California which has overtaken the property it was planted. It is over one acre in lateral size. The wisteria was also one of several floral emblems used by Japanese court along with Paulownia, and the Chrysanthemum.

    Abdulkarim: There was a small flock of peacocks at the Naval Postgraduate School here. They would sort of appear out of nowhere, and the males would often fan out their huge tails. They are rather content to stay if the food is plentiful.

  6. Post
    Author
    mahmood

    I’ve rethunk what I was going to do with them actually. I’ve got time. I’ve just potted them and left them inside by a west-facing window in order for them to get some sun but not be scorched by it. I’ll wait a couple of weeks for the heat to abate a bit before planting them.

    The current thinking is that I will put the Virginia creeper where I initially intended to put the wisteria. The wisteria is now going by the pool where I will (ultimately) build a pergola and the other one will go to the opposite corner of the house to climb up the side of the dining room where I will put stouter trellising.

    I’m quickly running out of walls! I really do need to buy the neighbour’s house and start doing stuff there!

  7. barry

    Mahmood: it should look splendid by the pool. Just remember, they do not transplant easily so once it’s there, make sure it’s where you want it, or Frances will have to buy you another ;). I’ve seen some really nice pergola covering very long walk ways. When covered in wisteria the flowers hang down like curtains of purple.

    They can also be trained as standard. Here’s a page that explains the different ways to train Wisteria:

    http://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profiles0605/wisteria.asp

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