Friday, September 4, 2009

Flowers

So as you all know...I just LOVE posting pictures of my flowers. It's probably silly considering my flowers are not NEARLY as glorious as most of the other flower gardens out there. I always admire lovely flower gardens throughout the neighborhood or as I'm driving by someplace. But you know why I'm so proud of MY flowers? Because *I* grew them! I grow a lot of flowers from seeds and while this year I mostly used petunias, I've been able to watch them grow tremendously!! That is why I'm proud of my flowers!! So here's the story of this summer's flower garden!

This is one of the MAIN plants I grew from seeds this year. And for the life of me I cannot remember what the name of these flowers is. I can tell you this...I've been watching very closely for a good opportunity to photograph them because they only bloom for like a day or two and disappear! I was really lucky to get this many blooms sprouting at one time! This flower plant was growing all summer and only recently started sprouting it's flowers!


6 at once!! Amazing!


This is the delphenium. You might remember the picture of it from earlier in the summer. It sprouted very nicely in early Spring. I had it out on the front porch and I thought it started getting too hot for it out there so I moved it to the back porch in the shade. It almost died right there. I've found it needs just the right amount of sunlight, so I moved it to the garden table which gets mainly just evening sun. And now it's growing amazing again after I pruned it down! I only took this picture a few days ago and it's already grown much more - new blooms will be sprouting on it again and I'll be sure to take more pictures!


My 3 petunia pots out front. I'm proud of these because they weren't doing so good in early Summer. The big pot was so sparse most of the summer. I tried just moving it back a few feet and guess what? It started growing like crazy! Just a few extra minutes a day of shade or something has really made a difference for the flowers in that pot. Isn't that so weird how flowers work! They really do have a life of their own and you have to figure out what they like and don't like in order for them to thrive :)


My favorite petunia pot. It's probably obvious why it's my favorite :P


The 3 main pots on the back porch. I added in some of those little blue/purple flowers in with the petunias and they are cute. I think they're not great for pots though. I've seen many flowers with them and they do much better in the actual ground. I have a feeling they are spreaders and like to spread their roots around.


The garden table. More petunias, blue flowers and the delphenium.


So here's a story for you! I water the plants every other day or so, depending on the heat outside. One day over this past weekend I went to water my favorite petunia pot out front! As I poured the water I saw a quick scampering from something. I've seen this before, lots of creatures like to live in my flowers :P This time though, it was a very green praying mantis! You can see from the two pictures below that I got it pretty good with the water - you can see droplets on it's back.


So I hurried and got the camera to snap some shots. In this one below I was pretty close to it. I think that combined with the fact that I had just tried to drown it really pissed the thing off :P After a few seconds of photo taking the thing actually FLEW at me!! Like right into my face! I honestly didn't even realize praying mantis' could fly!!! It was so weird and funny.


And after it flew/lunged at me, it landed on the driveway. It just stayed there for a few minutes and I gave up watching it and went back into the house :P


I'm always pruning the petunias. Every time a flower on them starts to wilt and shrivel, I'll pull it off. I've had to watch myself a few times because I've come close to grabbing some weird insect hiding out in the flowers. Ahhh the joys of gardening!! I love it!

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