A Green Week

At the beginning of last week we had talked about driving to Sarasota on Saturday. My favorite plant nursery – Tropiflora – was having its annual fall sale. Tropiflora has about 100,000 square feet of nursery plants under net and six true Northern greenhouses for special plants like orchids. Tropiflora is the largest / best place I have found in Florida for bromeliads. Most of the “under net” is for hundreds of varieties of bromeliads. We have visited there three times; I bring my camera because of the spectacular plants and inflorenscences (that’s what bromeliad people call the flowers…great word, huh?). I also get a new sense of awe about the amazing conglomeration of plants God has created.

A trip to Sarasota takes about 2.25 hours and we spend 2 to 3 hours with the plants ooing and ahhing as well as buying. It’s a whole day commitment, and with the price of gas and the Pres asking us to conserve a bit, and the typical busyness of our weekend, we decided to use the Internet and forego our little excursion. I ordered seven plants from the Tropiflora catalog Monday night and they were delivered to school on Wednesday. A couple of the larger bromeliads were shipped unpotted so I had to get them in dirt. One already had a large pup. A pup is how bromeliads normally propagate. A new plant buds out from the base of the parent and eventually gets clipped off and repotted. By supper time I had them situated in their new home.

We have three unusual new plants – one for its flowering (Vriesea scalaris), one for the pattern on its leaves (Vriesea hieroglyphica), and one for both leaves and flowers (Billbergia vittata ‘Domingos Martins’). I love the names! I think that I’m continuing God’s mandate to Adam when I learn plant names and care for them.

On Saturday I spent about six hours on the yard. Mowing and edging go quickly right now; the grass doesn’t grow as fast as it does in June and July. I still have to spend time pruning and weeding each week – stuff grows quickly and it’s not all where I want it to grow. The majority of my time was spent in the back yard. We have one laurel oak left and it’s doing well. The grass was growing right up to the trunk and I wanted to get that back a bit. I also had a Billbergia pyramidalis that needed to get out of its pot. This bromeliad does well around trees – tends to have many pups and will “climb” a bit.

I dug out about 2 feet of sod all the way around the tree. I had a problem with sod webworms in the back yard and before I treated them, I had about a third of the sod dead. Hateful things! I took the sod from around the tree and put in shovel sized plugs in the dead turf. And I dug into the electric cord that I had buried a year ago to run the pump that recycles the water in the fountain. I didn’t cut through the wires but I did cut the insulation, so I spent 20 minutes berating myself for carelessness while I taped up the nicks in the wires.

It’s still hot in Orlando. It was about 90 degrees again yesterday, but we had a nice breeze. For Florida it was a windy day, but in the Midwest or New Mexico it would be just breezy. A front came down to northern Florida so we got a breeze and last evening, about a tenth of an inch of rain. Good for the sod project!