LATE JUNE RAMBLINGS

With the summer heat bearing down it seemed like a fine time to work in the shade.

I have been eyeballing this area beside my shed for some time . It is under my Avocado tree and stays in the shade most all day or at least heavily filtered light.

I use it to stick some of my heat stressed plants in containers here sometimes to recover when they got too much sun.

So this week the shade area got transformed into a small bed for some of my shade plants to have a new home and not require so much Summer care.

Here is the finished bed into which went some shade loving Bromeliads and their divided pups.

The short fence is there to keep the dogs from running around the corner by way of over the plant bed.

The Passion Vine that I let grow up my back porch awning is really going wild.

It has reached the awning top and grown sideways to the house in two directions . This vine is at least 12 feet long.

It has produced Passion Flowers which last for one day before falling off the vine.

We had ten Passion Flowers in bloom at the same time this last week.

It is really neat to watch and this is the first time this vine has bloomed here for me. It is a volunteer that started itself from a vine around the corner.

The vine will be safe until the first hurricane gets close to the sandpit when I will have to cut it out to close the awning.

In the meantime it is producing an abundance of flowers and has numerous butterflys on it throughout the day.

We also gave the Bird area a rearranging. This corner I save for the birds and have planted protective bushes to encourage them .

There is Orange Jasmine shrubs in the far back and a large Cassia bush to the right of the bird feeder.

These bushes give them a lot of hiding places which birds seem to like.

The bush in front of the feeder is an American Beauty berry that I started from seed two years ago.

It is almost chest high now and will produce clusters of berries that the birds eat from the stems. I think it is related to the Mulberry tree.

Anyway the birds have more cover and seem to like it . There are two Northern Mockingbirds and a Loggerhead Shrike that hang out here eating bugs every afternoon. Free bug control for the organic garden.

And speaking on bugs here is one of my Spider lilies that has bloomed this week.

For some reason I find this plant fascinating .

It is just able to display a subtle simple beauty that appeals to me.

And as far as the home made bug repellent for the vegetables I have started mixing up the ingredients for the folk brew.

The first step was to get a bar of Ivory soap. It is supposed to be soap not detergent although I really don't know the difference or why it would matter. But it might so we got the soap bar.

Now this has to be whittled down into slivers and put into a container with a bit of water so the bar will melt into a liquid slurry.

Done and done for step one. Going to let the Ivory slurry percolate a few days and shake the container every time I go by it to mix the soap well.

More on the mixtures progress next time.

--Sanddune--