lilies – Nancy Tart: Writing for Life

Okra & “Fire Lilies”

May 28, 2020

Okra & “Fire Lilies”

Today we planted okra. Three long rows of okra plants just far enough apart to walk through the rows with the mower for easy weeding, pruning, and harvesting.

Yesterday and Tuesday were the 6 by 4 corn patch. The 5 by 4 corn patch already has rows of little green stalks pushing up and it was planted Saturday! We also did a patch of mustard greens and our trio experiment over the weekend. The “trio experiment” is onion seed, three inches, beet seed, three inches, carrot seed in a patch 3 by 3.

Oh, all numbers are in feet… so far.

And my favorite of my blooms at this house (since my gardenia has been reluctant to bloom) is this –

– it’s a bulb with a single straight stalk that ends in this fiery flower! We call them fire-lilies but I know that can’t be their official name. It’s a takeaway from Grandma Jeanette… a little piece of history carried along and the blooms make me think of her every time I see a new one exploding with color.

(oh, and if you know what it is, please comment! We’d love to know what it really is!)

Lucas and Thea ate all six ripe tomatoes themselves before they got inside. I managed to sneak one away for the egg scramble I made for brunch. (I eat shakeology breakfast at 5:45 so at 11am I was practically starving and had to grab something filling and nutritious!)

We have little pets who poop breakfast… and Becky made more of these:

Yummy deviled eggs; Becky is a pro at this now!

YES!

Worked at gym yesterday… REC CLASSES OPEN MONDAY!! Camp fills up quickly & starts June 1st (I can’t wait to see my gymnasts!) and we get to have gym party (Parent’s Night Out) this month!! (Third Saturday of each month: our coaches entertain and feed a boocoodle of kiddos so their parents can have a night kidfree… here)

I’m excited about coaching again! I’m thrilled about our garden! I even got to play Age of Empires with Jillian and Lucas today while big sisters went shopping!

We had a lovely day!

Type at you later,

~Nancy Tart

Elephant Ears

May 24, 2018

Elephant Ears

One of my favorite garden bulbs is what we call “Elephant Ears.”

These are from three bulbs that we dug up in some weeds when we first moved in. They were tiny, neglected, and crowded. With good fertilizer and plenty of water, (we didn’t have to water them, God did it with the rain!) those three multiplied into fifteen by January when we replanted them in this nice half-shady strip between the carport and the side of the house.

We also leave the wild flowers that don’t crowd out our bulbs. Tiny white flowers that spread like ground cover are some of Jillian’s favorite because they look like “stars on green sky.” (Those are under the star lily in the above picture, but their blooms look like dots in the picture.)

These are the smallest ones. The elephant ears are now growing alongside a few lilies, six pineapples, tomatoes, and squash. (The clump of bushy leaves on the right corner are tomatoes.) The plants are called elephant ears because their leaves get to be the size of African Elephant’s ears. I’ve grown some before, which by their third year, had leaves that were five feet wide! (Since you have to clip the ears off at the stalk when the ears fall to help encourage new growth, the girls would save the clipped stalks for umbrellas!)

These are some of the “wild” tomatoes. This means we didn’t sow them there, they just came from our fertilizer/compost and we tended the plants as they sprouted. Jillian has the worm-picking job because we don’t use pesticides.

I love Florida bulbs, they are easy to grow and propagate quickly. I can give the many extras away and cover my yard in little groves of them within just a couple of years. Now if I can just get fruit trees like fig, citrus, kumquat, pineapple, and bananas to grow as well!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you later…

~Nancy Tart

Results of the Rains

May 22, 2018

Results of the Rains

In late Florida Spring, we get rain. Who am I kidding? We get flooded. Our meteorologists have a very easy job. They can say, “we have a 100% chance of rain at some point today with clouds and a chance of thundershowers.” We do get a few slivers of sunlight, just enough to remind us that the sun is still battling for dominance.

A result of this rainy season is a slight change to the adage “April showers bring May flowers;” in Florida it’s “A string of showers bring beautiful flowers.”

Aren’t they gorgeous?

We had only a few small bulbs in neglected clusters when we moved in last year. We dug them up, separated them, replanted and fertilized the soil at least monthly with organic non-toxic high-nitrogen fertilizer. They reward us with amazing blooms after the showers!

Our fiery orange and yellow blooms are Kimberly’s favorite. (We had just three bulbs last year!) These are our front yard background flowers with their huge oval leaves and tall stalks.

Our bright white and fuchsia lilies make the bulk of the garden blooms.

These little buggers were in four clusters all dejected. A total of 34 bulbs – now they cover in a checkerboard pattern the front, center, side, one beautiful cluster, and lines between the cedar trees along the driveway. There are easily 100 bulbs now and we’ll have more in January when we replant.

Then there are my awesome tiny purple blooms with straight stalks called “Mexican Petunias.” Grandma Jeanette had a yard full of those! These are actually great-grand flowers off of some cuttings Grandma Jeanette gave me about ten years ago. So they are our “heirloom flowers.” (Yes, that’s a collard on the right.)

I love the results of the rain!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

Spring Seeds

March 3, 2018

Spring Seeds

Florida likes to tease our tropical plants a bit with a fake spring. It’s really the start of spring weather but we will have at least one more cold snap to remind us that we do participate briefly in the season the rest of the country calls winter.

My favorite plant (outside of anything edible and my personal favorite trio of roses, gardenia, and Camilla) type is bulb. In Florida, many bulbs thrive with minimum care. Our yard had a few worn beds of overgrown bulbs when we arrived. Year one was break them up and replant.

Year two is sprouting. (See how I love bulbs! Fast growing, hardy and results in a year!)

Elephant ears are one of my favorites, but this yard has two types of elephant ears, bananas, gorgeous lilies, fire-flowers, a yellow-red lily with a huge 6” bloom (just a green few in the picture here as tall, cup-like leaves with “spokes”), and the normal replanted ones like celery, onion, and garlic. Celery bottoms replant and grow until they are tired of being stepped on. We have one two-year pineapple and two newbies. Two garlic cloves are growing. Dozens of onions dot the design.

And we have what we call “bonus plants” these come from our fertilizer.

We fertilize with an organic mix of hay, biodegraded plant material, and chicken droppings. Since our philosophy is to waste nothing, our chickens end up eating a lot of kitchen scraps that include seeds. This often leads us to wonderful “bonus plants.”

These gems are usually milo, wheat, millet, collard, eggplant, citrus, pepper, or tomato! We’ve noted cucumber, sunflower, and pumpkin as well. When we find a tomato, we baby it. Usually, though, the next day the lizard hunter has trampled it even though the gardens are strictly off limits. Any lizard who makes it to the house or the garden is safe!

But this spring we were babying one tiny tomato in the front porch garden when today, voila! ~ ~ We discovered this literal bed of tomatoes hiding under an elephant ear! We’re so excited we haven’t figured out if we want to attempt to dig them up and separate them while they are small or just leave them in this area they appear to like. (I’m beginning to believe a single chicken must have eaten an entire bag of tomatoes last season!)

All of our young pullets are finally hens, laying and regularly producing so we have an average excess of 10 dozen eggs a week! Now our chickens pay for themselves and the dogs! (The money we get from the market for our eggs pays for chicken feed and dog feed.) I love the seeds of spring!

(So does Lucas, who had to have his picture taken without his dirty shirt.)

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

Tag: lilies

Okra & “Fire Lilies”

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Elephant Ears

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Results of the Rains

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Spring Seeds

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