I will look up that name and go take a closer look at what I have. It had a lot of blooms thinking about opening on it the other day but only one had popped.

I started out just spraying soapy water but we are in a monsoon like pattern here and I can't keep anything on the plant long enough to get rid of the bugs. Last night I went out and tented the plants because they are drowning so they won't get anymore water and I sprayed them with a heavier duty spray. I usually like to go the more natural route but have gotten desperate for something fast or I will lose the plants. I got these as plants too instead of seeds. I was really hoping to take seeds off these for next year since they are really nice heritage plants. If it doesn't stop raining soon for a little while I may not have any garden. Even my blueberries are struggling. This same time last year I was already harvesting. We haven't had enough sun yet this year though to even begin to get them to change.

Ugh, sorry about all your rain, hope your garden makes it through it. Jenn, how do you go about getting seeds from a tomato plant? I know with my cherry tomatos, I have new plants come back every year, not always in the same place but guaranteed i'll have new plants...yet, the regular tomato plants, like the Beefsteak, Celebrity, Roma, ever come back. In fact, thats pretty much how i know when to plant my vegetable garden, when I start seeing the cherry tomato plants start popping up. Would be nice to know though how to get seeds from tomato plants with regular sized tomatos

Was at the nursury today and found this beautiful black Petunia...its called "Black Magic" I put it next to my Black Cherry Petunia to show the contrast. Now, while Mishka isnt looking, I need to find a place for it Like the tag says though, "Everything goes with black"

I love the Black Magics. I had some last year and they did so well and bloomed a really long time.

I've been doing the whole, cut a tomato open and scoop the seeds out. I wash and let them dry then store them in a bag where it's dry. Going to try and different method this year. Saw it on this site:

http://gardenboxfarms.com/1/post/2013/08/tomato-seed-saving.html

Thank you for the link, that looks way easy! (ugly ass tomatoes used as example though) I bought I think 6 different varieties this year, I'll see which plants do best and try saving seeds from those.

Good to know with the Black Magics too...I almost didnt buy them cuz a couple years ago I bought Black Petunias with yellow stripes going thru them and they didnt do well at all. Good news too! Mishka doesnt seem to have noticed them (maybe the black doesnt "attract" her to them) and I planted them in the same pot that has the Poppy! LOL

I think they do better if you dead head them. Whenever my blooms were wilted and basically done I would pluck them off. I've been doing the same thing with the purple and the pink flowers in my front containers and they have really turned on and should bloom about all summer too.

lol. I have one of the black Krim tomatoes that are so ugly. I picked it and a pink Brandywine up to take the place of my dark Brandywine and my Dr. Wyches that the rain has tried to kill. They aren't dead dead yet but I figured just in case I better get some backups.

Wow that black magic is awesome looking. Looks like velvet, so rich looking. let's hope Mishka doesn't notice it.

@Jenn...I bought, by accident, one slightly ugly variety of tomato, it's called "Cherokee Purple", the rest of mine are common tomatoes, like Beefsteak, Early Girl, Roma, Celebrity, and I know there's atleast one more but I don't remember the name of it. I give all my tomatoes to my mom so I'll have to wait for her "review" on the Cherokee Purples, haha. I really hope your garden doesn't suffer from that rain!

@Renee...I love it!!! And nope, each day I come home I check and flowers are still intact, haha, Mishka doesn't see them ;p black flowers are kinda invisible. I may have to buy more and maybe get some white ones and mix one pot with blacks and whites, I think it'd look pretty cool

I would be interested to see what your mom thinks of their taste. I don't eat tomatoes, but instead am going to can them for sauces and such so having different types and odd balls work well for me since even if they wouldn't taste good on their own on a sandwich they can usually still be made to taste good in spaghetti sauce. I am drawn to the more unique stuff. At my parent's house when I still lived at home I had a lot of black flowers and plants and the dogs never bothered them.

Ahhh, ok, I didn't even think about sauces (I get Prego at Costco, LOL) these purple Cherokees have the longest maturity date too so I'm thinkin a good tomato for sauces, these take 90 days compared to like 65 days for the BigBoys. But I'll let you know what my mom says (in like 3 months, haha) I just went out there and everything's growing great, my pumpkin plant is already like triple the size and all my tomatoes are flowering. Cherry tomatoes are already fruiting but they came up long before I planted the rest.

I still have no fruit on my tomatoes but we are only just now getting over the insane amount of rain we've had. My two that I thought drowned are trying to plug through but they've got a long ways to go now that they literally have two leaves left.

i want a full view of the areas to see it all laid out, if you have free time between all the yard work! im not sure i have ever seen a black flower around here, kind of cool.
loving all the updates.

Jimmy, have you ever considered getting a picture from a helicopter (or small plane) of your place? I'm betting that would be one impressive work of art!

Google flies Cali pretty often. An aerial view might not be out of the question. Or even your local assessor's office might have aerials online for you to snip. I bet it would make for an interesting perspective.

@jbealer...do you mean like a drawing/plans/blueprint type of thing? Cuz I didn't use anything like that, everything was done visually, but I could probly pretty easily draw it all out to a certain extent...or do you mean in like a series of pictures? I could probly do that too

@Al...thank you so much! I'd need like a drone or something to get low enough for detail, otherwise it's just tops of everything, like a tree top would hide anything underneath it, stuff like that.

@jenn...I've seen my house on one of those, so I know I could find it...but if I remember correctly, it could tell someone like exactly where I live, like street names/major monuments/etc. not that I worry about any member here knowing that kind of thing but *anybody* looking at this site could then know...I'll take a look though and if it's not too invasive, I can post a screen shot or something

So this is the closest aerial I could get...zooming in any more just blurs everything. The white blotches are where I had to get rid of my address. My house is the one with the pool.

Yeah, anytime you get into google they like to stamp everything. Assessor photos are usually a lot more sterile as far as visual geospatial orientation. Only issue with Assessor photos is that depending on how rich your assessor's office is they can be a lot out of date. Google flies here only every 2 years. Our assessor's office might fly every decade if money comes up for it.

Only place with a pool. Your house must be the party house. lol.

Jimmy, was thinking something easy like just standing in the street and getting the "full picture" of all the beds and pots, same for the back yard, just a nice here it all is pic you took it way farther with a aerial view! thats cool, im pretty sure our house is way outdated pics

jbealer wrote:

Jimmy, was thinking something easy like just standing in the street and getting the "full picture" of all the beds and pots, same for the back yard, just a nice here it all is pic  you took it way farther with a aerial view! thats cool, im pretty sure our house is way outdated pics

Jenn - go to google pedometer, type in your address, put it on satellite and zoom in...I'll bet the image is more recent than you think. And, you may be able to get a view without street names if you finagle it right. Took me a while, but them my computer skills are rather rudimentary.

Jimmy - it looks like that hill drops precipitously. Are you guys ever at landslide risk?

And how did you get that picture to post without just a link?!???

@Jenn (Twister) LOL, this neighborhood is kinda stuffy...not sure anyone even knows how to party, lol. It's funny tho, in the pic, the house next to the gray one used to have a pool! I didn't even realize they filled it in! If I woulda posted the entire pic of the street, you woulda seen lots of pools, but then you wouldn't have been able to decipher which house was mine, haha.

@Jennifer...ok, that's easy enough to do...some areas are closed in though, like the courtyard, not as easy to get a full on panoramic shot but I'll figure it out. I'll work on that this wknd.

@Amy...supposedly, according to a scientist they interview whenever we have El Niño rains, the area I live in is one of the most stable in the city/state. Something to do with the type of soil. However, back in the day, down the street from me quite a ways, during El Niño rains, one house lost 90% of their backyard including their in ground pool, it apparently was on the news and everything, the house next to it lost about 40% of their backyard, apparently the builders fault and thru some kind of settlement, the builder had to buy back those two houses and is never allowed to sell them again YET they can rent them out, to me that's just weird. when my pool was leaking though, my father told me it had to be taken care of immediately because if too much water soaked in underneath it, it would lift up out of the ground and possibly slide right down the canyon. That project was a nightmare.

With the pic...I used my iPad. With a tablet or phone, you can bring whatever it is you want on the screen and take a screen shot (with the iPad, just holding down the button that's on the face of the tablet for a couple seconds and using the power button to snap a pic) then it goes into your photo album where you can do whatever you want with it, in my case I cropped it and then erased all the street names and my address.

Jimmy - I've found a trick to keep a hole filled and regrow grass when it's one the dog's repeatedly dig...there was a depression in the lawn where a tree was cut down years and years and years ago. The puppies found it very appealing - i think it was the insects working on the last of the roots - and dug a fairly decent crater. I filled it in and seeded a couple of times and they went right back. Last time, I filled most of it with rocks cleared from the vegetable garden (I was out of easy to get dirt ) then topped it with soil, seeded it, used landscape staples to hold down a piece of chicken wire and covered the whole thing with straw. I'm even finding that straw alone will deter them in many cases!

Might help you with your prolific two!

Excellent idea Amy, I had thought of chicken wire or a metal mesh but couldn't figure out how I'd keep it there without it getting moved or them getting hurt on it, the landscape staples are perfect! I'm at a crossroads now though...we are in water restrictions now and the weather has begun heating up, so it's in my best interest to just let the grass die for the summer and start over again in the fall, but I really really really don't want to do that <sighs> my plants are surviving well on the water restrictions (I only have been watering twice a week) but the grass is a battle to keep green and it takes a lot of water. The bare areas are getting bigger and bigger. Btw, I tried the poop in a hole thing...it works! However, for weeks they wouldn't even lay on the lawn (and I really want them to, I know from Malukhai and then Kohdi, how much the grass means to them) so that kinda sucked and then my concern about them using the lawn to do their business on came true, once they knew poop was there, it became a convenient place to go and I had that lawn off limits to pooping and peeing.

Ok, so I'll get started on my "here it is" pics that Jennifer requested, which is cool cuz I can give more history and explanation of things and what got it to this point

Here is the front from the street. There used to be an enormous Monterey Pine about right where I have my teeny weenie little Colorado Spruce now, the pine died from a beetle/borer that attacks these trees and man did it die quickly. Upon cutting it down it was already instant firewood. The Blue Juniper you see used to connect to each other (formed a hedge of sorts), there is a small low growing juniper (green) down by the sidewalk near my dry river, that juniper used to cover like half the yard. The larger tree to the right in the rear corner is an Olive tree. I used a garden hose to design the river using the Olive tree as a "break" (turn) and since the yard slopes down towards the street, I thought it'd be cool to form drops (like a waterfall) using flat topped boulders. Along the river sides I planted Agapanthus, a red Flax, Yarrow, an Asparagus Fern, some white flowered plant I thought I knew the name of but still don't, red Salvia, and on each side at the front I put a Wheelers Pittosporum (I call them my living boulders, haha). I shaped an area for a lawn and installed sod, and bordered it with a groundcover called Santa Barbara Daisy's. There is a Colorado Spruce in the lawn...I chose this tree cuz its growth pattern resembles a Christmas tree, and this area also gets decorated at Christmastime. I used boulders to build up a planter around both blue Junipers and to line a small path to a sitting bench. One planter is larger (obviously, haha), the thought process here was to prevent people from taking shortcuts from the sidewalk to my front door.  





the purple are stargazers that seeded themselves there...

larger planter...it houses my amaryllis as well


Behind the fences with brick pillars you see on each side of the walkway is my courtyard area... comes tomorrow night...its kinda late, and I have to be up at 5:30haha

Christmas decor. We can keep these gardening threads going all year round. My husband keeps wanting to plant a Blue spruce in our yard. I keep telling we don't have space. lol. How big might that Colorado spruce get?

TwisterII wrote:

Christmas decor. We can keep these gardening threads going all year round. My husband keeps wanting to plant a Blue spruce in our yard. I keep telling we don't have space. lol. How big might that Colorado spruce get?

Huge - more tall than wide. We've been here 28 years and there was a maybe 20 ft tall, 10 ft wide tree in full sun. Today it is maybe 15 ft across and it has once been pruned by the power company because some dumb ass planted it under the power lines. It's head is now once again mingled in the power lines.

BUT, it grows rather slowly - at least up here where winter is about 6 months of the year. I planted 2 yr seedlings about 4 years ago, maybe 5, and I just transplanted 4 ft (ish) trees to permanent location.

So you could really have a manageable tree for 20-30 years and, , cut it down if need be and start again.