extreme drought in volusia

So, a couple of days ago, I was griping about how our weather  has been unseasonably warm this year.

It appears our part of the country had it particularly bad compared to the rest. Florida had been running the whole gamut, from "Abnormally Dry" to "Exceptional Drought":

Volusia County, where Orange City is situated, is in Extreme Drought.

The drought outlook for the next three months predict some improvements--there's still drought, but not so much as now. (What, rain teasers but no downpours? We get cloudy days but whatever precipitation these overcast skies deliver doesn't even touch the ground.)

screencap from National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center

Not something our firefighters in Florida would love to know, eh?

Time to do the rain dance?

Nah. I'll stick to the Rosary--I'll ask Mama Mary to get us some much-needed rain...without the floods. Just enough so it'll be Mother Nature watering the gardens daily (or even every other day), instead of me, heh.

growing mexican petunias from cuttings

I'm riding on my luck in growing stuff from cuttings so this time around, I'm trying to propagate our one measly petunia in a container--a gift from another one of our Filipino friends.

So far, the li'l buggers are holding up nicely.

This time around, I didn't add any secret sauce. I wonder how they'll fare...

Anyways, once these cuttings grow up and flower, I'm hoping they'll look as beautiful as these ones:

image by perfectplaces.iivi-designs.com

One thing I like about Mexican petunias is the fact that they're quite hardy here in Florida. In fact, they're a familiar sight in most every front yards we drive by.

One unique thing about this Florida perennial: the flowers hang around only for a day. They bloom early in the morning and by evening, the blooms are already resting on the ground.

And they're such show-offs. The brilliant purple flowers are so pleasing to the eyes, you'd want them to stay around longer than a day.

What I like about the Mexican petunia though is that from spring to spring--barring any frost--they'll keep flowering and flowering and flowering.

It's like they're trying to make up for their inability to last beyond a day by constantly bombarding you with more of their blooms...year round if they can help it.

unseasonably warm weather

I’m a fairly new transplant to the Sunshine State. Been only here three years but for the past two years, I’ve experienced how COLD the weather could go.

This time 'round, we’ve had a warm winter though. I remember celebrating brother-in-law S’s birthday in February this year with just a light sweater covering me out on the patio at night. On the same day last year, we’d been wearing bubble jackets!

No wonder.

The National Climatic Data Center maps the temperature averages across the states and us geeky gardeners loves to, well, peruse it. (I never knew I’d find maps fascinating to begin with.) Their data shows that we’ve had unseasonably warm weather—from winter to before spring—this season.

You can see that from January to March, it has progressively gotten warmer in Florida.

From the NCDC State of the Climate overview for March, 2012:

Every state in the nation experienced a record warm daily temperature during March. According to preliminary data, there were 15,272 warm temperature records broken (7,755 daytime records, 7,517 nighttime records). Hundreds of locations across the country broke their all-time March records. There were 21 instances of the nighttime temperatures being as warm, or warmer, than the existing record daytime temperature for a given date. (Emphasis mine.)

This wasn't good, apparently:

The warmer-than-average conditions across the eastern US....created an environment favorable for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. According to NOAA's Storm Prediction Center, there were 223 preliminary tornado reports during March, a month that averages 80 tornadoes. The majority of the tornadoes occurred during the March 2-3 outbreak across the Ohio Valley and Southeast, which caused 40 fatalities and damages exceeding 1.5 billion U.S. dollars. (Again, emphasis mine.)

The past year's temperatures were “above normal” in all but six states in the continental US, with record warmest in several states up north!

The 12-month period (April 2011-March 2012), which includes the second hottest summer (June-August) and fourth warmest winter (December-February), was the warmest such period for the contiguous United States. Twenty-eight states were record warm for the 12-month period, and an additional eleven states had April-March temperatures ranking among their ten warmest. Oregon and Washington were the only states cooler than average for the period. The 12-month running average temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 55.4 degrees F, which is 2.6 degrees F above the 20th century average. (I gotta emphasize what I think is interesting, don't I? Heh.)

El Niňo marching on or climate change?

I’m a tropical bird so I like that the weather was comfortable during the past winter. But...I’m afraid we’re paying for that this spring. I don’t even want to think how high the temperatures will go in the coming summer.

Source: State of the Climate National Overview, March 2012 (NCDC)

asiatic day lily emerging

It's a happy day! For a couple of weeks now (maybe more), I've been watching my Asiatic Day Lily send out shoots little by little. I bought it as a bulb from Big Lots in March.

The package said two but only one lived to tell the tale. Still, I felt good so today, I'm debuting her to the world.

If all goes well for this, I'm hoping to see some yellow blooms in the upcoming months.

(Saying "weeks"  might be too optimistic, so I'm hedging my bets. Besides, I'm trying to avoid bad juju heh.)

Hopefully, this Asiatic Day Lily will look like this (wfc):

Image by ozwildbird

finally, my calladium lives!

Before the weekend rains, I was anxiously looking for signs of life from my caladium container sitting on our back porch. No such luck.

Two others out front had no signs of life either so I was thinking about alternative plantings on all three.

After the rains, though, I was gratified to see that the back porch caladium has given me pause about my plans and sent out not one, not two, but three itsy bitsy shoots!

Thank God for the rains!

I don't know what type or cultivar it is but I'm hoping my caladiums would look like this soon:

image from wikipedia commons

I was wondering how to propagate them. They look beautiful when crowded together like this. Mr. Google says the tubers can be divided. Gotta look up how to properly care for them, heh.

after the rains

We’ve had two days and nights of intermittent downpours and my little vegetables in the garden, as well as my ornamentals, are loving it.

My second crop of green beans has consented to come out of their snug soil covers...

...hot peppers sown from seeds harvested from, well, Asian peppers bought at the Oriental store in Orlando, are a-fruiting...

...and okras only a foot or so tall are flowering. 

(The last one’s leaving me scratching my head, with their diminutive size and all. The first time I grew okras, I didn't have any blossoms until they were more than a couple of feet tall. But wth! My family’s been itching for some fresh okras—another one in our longish list of favorite veggies—so I’m not complaining.)

Oh, and my bitter gourd (the much loved ampalaya of Pinoy diabetics) has just sent out its first fruitling. Ain’t that grand?

(I think one of these days, Sis-in-Law R will be wanting to harvest some of the bitter gourd leaves to put in our monggo stew.)

growing lantana from cuttings, week 2

The other day, I visited my lantana cuttings to air them out a bit.

They're already on the second week in the mini greenhouse I erected around them. Google said it was time to expose them bit by bit to the outside world.

I remember starting out with just two leaves at the tips and now, I see that they have grown four to each.

Some even had new leaf growths.

To give the leaves leeway as they sprout up and out, I placed wire frames to hold the Ziploc plastic that I'll be putting back in place.

I hope when I transfer them to individual pots next week, they'll survive the transplant with wonderful aplomb.:)

earth day 2012

It’s Earth Day today! Happy, er, birthday (?) Mother Earth!

Though it’s hard to determine how old Mother Earth is (some say she’s about 4.55 billion years old, give or take a few million), the mere fact that we continue to enjoy its bounty and generosity is amazing.

And I was happy to note that Google Doodle paid tribute to Mother Earth (whom I’m beginning to notice and love at the ripe youngish age of 40). Here's the doodle in video:

With my new obsession with gardening, I’ve begun to appreciate just how vital the earth is, especially in terms of the food I eat. That’s because I get to wrestle with Mother Earth for some of the food that I bring to my table.

I’m more aware now of the rhythms of the seasons, of the importance of handling the soil with care—chemicals only as a last resort!—to reap health from it, of the many players that influence the health of Mother Earth (it finally sunk in that she really gets sick!), and of the consequences of choices I make in everyday life on how long I get to enjoy a giving Earth.

I strive to go organic in my gardens, eschewing synthetic chemicals to solve pests and diseases. (The best way to have no problem at all is to nip any potential issue at the bud, no pun intended.)

I also reuse, reduce, recycle and re-buy, but sometimes, I have to learn to refuse. But I'm learning and hopefully getting better as I go.

Most of the time, it’s easy to cut Mother Earth some slack because I’ve made the decision to go green and be earth-friendly in my vegetable gardening.

I’m hoping one day, I can truly be green-thinking and green-living not only in the garden but also in my entire life so that I can help Mother Earth live 4.55 billion years more. :)

And not just on Earth Day!

PS:
Btw, if you followed the link below the search bar on Google, you'll be brought to a page where you can connect with other gardeners on Google+, buy discounted seeds and find a community garden near you.

I plugged in my home address and got two results for the community gardens near me: one on East French Avenue and one in Sandy Pines. I'm suddenly interested.

Looks like there's more reason to celebrate Earth Day this 2012, huh?

finally, a roma tomato sighting!

A while back, I said that I forgot to label my tomatoes so in my garden I didn't know which is which. I've only ever seen the cherry tomatoes so I'm still to witness roma tomatoes in there.

Oh, did I forget to mention that I grew too many tomatoes from seeds this spring and gave the ones I didn't need to J, my kumpare?

(Kumpare is a Filipino word that refers to the father of your godchild--a generic name used for each other to signify the baptismal ties. Of course, the female counterpart is a kumare, so I'm J's kumare.)

So I don't know if I had romas or not.

Finally, I discovered I had one roma tomato plant in my vegetable garden!

my first roma tomato fruit for this spring's growing season

The discovery was fueled when I was staking in supports for my growing tomatoes.

tomatoes finally staked. i took a long while to get round to
this task so some of the tomatoes were already
bending (see far right, bottom plant)

I hope there's not just the one, otherwise we'll have a glut of cherry tomatoes in our house and J would have a surfeit of roma tomatoes in his, heh.

rains, a severe thunderstorm warning, and bushfires

Looks like nature’s mocking me. I’m sobbing into a bucket—well, sorta—because of a depressing report and the skies are overcast.

grey skies above my vegetable garden

And yeah, as I tap away at the keyboard for this post, the rains are raining on my pity parade!

the rains from outside my bedroom window

But don’t mind me.

I’m actually grateful Heaven’s deemed to bless me and my gardens with rain today. My garden could use the moisture for the next few days. (Then again, just after it had a whole lotta soaking yesterday. Dayum!)

rain-soaked vegetable garden, from a window perch

And the forecast is picking up (or gearing down, depends on the way you see it) into the weekend. Relative to weather that’s more spring-like, that is.

forecast from aApril 21-24, 2012.
screencap from the weather channel desktop app

We’re back to temperate mid-70s temperatures during the day, with a little cloud cover to make tending the garden more comfortable. But that’s only until the weekend. As the next week gears up, we return to unseasonably warm spring weather.

forecast from april 25-29, 2012.
screencap from the weather channel desktop app

The rains and thunderstorms may not be what the Florida Forest Service ordered this week and the next though.

The forecast just means their work tamping down brushfires may have dialed up. What with all the lightning that could lick dry grass, linger for a few days, and go in for the incendiary kill in a few days fire department heads are saying the wildfire danger index has just gone the “Extreme” end.

image by cfnews13.com

Currently, there are 91 active wildfires across Florida and some 40,000 acres have already paid the price for it. Sad. Hope there are no more bushfires lighting up this season.

first harvest, spring 2012

Went to water my garden yesterday and saw that the bush beans were begging to be picked.

That officially makes beans--which was heretofore something that reminded me of my brown-thumbish past because the first two seasons only yielded stunted beans--my first ever harvest this growing season!

Blanched them for about 5 minutes and served them as a side salad for my yummy Bistek (so says hubby and in-laws).

bok tower gardens

A while back—way, way back—R (my sister-in-law) had a prenup photo shoot and she asked one of our Sunshine friends to arrange it.

Friend A brought us all the way to Lake Wales, where the Bok Tower Gardens were. It was a pretty long drive—about 2 hours, including the pit stops for leaks—and by the time we were a few minutes a-ways, some of us were already on the wrong side of hypoglycemia.

We started out very early (in my opinion) and us 3 girls—Friend A, the bride-to-be, and hubby's assistant (me)—were cramped in the backseat of hubby’s Dakota. (Both boys—hubby the driver and the groom-to-be, where comfortably seated out front, argh!)

No legroom, leaky plumbing,  a grumbling stomach and I was all moody and quiet.

Good thing the destination more than made up for the grumpy ride.

the singing tower, as seen from the gardens

Bok Tower Gardens is one helluva botanical garden—tastefully landscaped and so picturesque, it was total eye candy for a sightseeing and photography junkie like me.

majestic oaks and love seats make for a poignant afternoon

a bench perfect for some romantic tryst

total eye candy, if you ask me

even the heron was a beautiful sight!

So I had fun click-click-clicking my way through the garden while running on the heels of a soon-to-be-hitched couple and their photographers.

(I took these pictures using Friend A's camera because mine—unfortunately—died on me in the first 5 minutes of getting to Bok Tower. The too-early morning wake up call scrambled my brains and I left behind my batteries...no pun intended.)

One of the things I love—something I thought was only for wimps when I was younger because it was so cheesy—is flowers. The more colorful and unusual they are, the better. (I’ll perorate later on the whys and wherefores of my flower love.)

I shot some really nice flowers on that hottish August day:

watchful yellow justicias

fiery red bromeliads in a row

stately and regal blue agapanthus blooms

(I'll let you in on a secret though: it took me hours—hours, I tell you!—to identify these flowers.)

Some stuff about Bok Tower Gardens:

• The gardens, spanning some 50 acres of land, were designed by famous landscape artist Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.
• It appears that the rolling greens of Bok Tower Gardens were originally “arid sandhills”, sporting only “virgin pines and sandhill scrub”
• Edward Bok—erstwhile editor of The Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1880s and Pulitzer Prize author—asked Olmsted to do the landscaping to preserve the “hilltop and create a bird sanctuary”
• There's a self-guided tour of the Pinewood Estate gardens and Mediterranean-style mansion (included in the National Registry of Historic Places), but for a fee
• The pride of Olmsted’s gardens is a 205-foot Singing Tower crafted in the art-deco and neo-Gothic style.
• The carillon tower has 60 bells and rings every half hour, though I can’t remember hearing it at the time. (I think there were some repairs being made.)

the singing tower, up close and personal

the whole shebang, all 205 feet of it

The only other carillon that I’ve loved is the one in UP Diliman, my alma mater:

the UP carillon tower and plaza. when i first attended the
state university this area wasn't as beautiful as it is now.
image by boink_99

One of these days, I'm definitely going to return to Bok Tower Gardens and when I do, I'm going to make sure I have my camera and lots of extra batteries (this time, pun intended)! I intend to explore and shoot to my heart's content.