Archive for September 6th, 2008

Cape Plumbago

This is another photograph that I took today.  It’s a picture of a cape plumbago bush in our yard.  It is full of light blue flowers right now.  It started blooming in July.  

This plant is amazing, because it grows and thrives with so little water.  I rarely water this plant, and it hasn’t rained here since February!  Yet, it grows and blooms anyway. Maybe it gets some hydration from nearby plants that I do water.

Cape plumbago grows fast and needs regular trimming.  It’s an incredibly resilient plant. I transplanted it once and didn’t get enough of its roots.  After that transplant, it wilted and died back to the ground.  But it regenerated a few months later.  

Cape plumbago is frost sensitive.  This bush died back again during freezing weather in January 2007.  I thought it was dead then.  But only a few months after the freeze, it started to grow back yet again.

September 06 2008 | Plumbago | Comments Off on Cape Plumbago

Lavendar Touch Eggplant

This picture is a photograph of an eggplant that is growing in one of our two raised garden beds.  The eggplant variety is Lavender Touch.  I selected this variety because the fruit looks so different from a typical eggplant.  

I planted three eggplants as transplants in our garden on July 4.  I have been watering them every few days and fertilizing them with water soluble fertilizer once a week.

I was a bit skeptical that these eggplants would produce fruit, because they were planted so late.  I have never grown eggplant before this year, and I am thrilled at how easy they are to grow.  They have grown substantially, especially in the last few weeks, and they are producing fruit.  They seem to be thriving in the hot weather we have been experiencing.  The high temperatures here have been mostly in the 90s for the past two weeks.

I have read that, in our climate, many warm weather annual fruits and vegetables can be planted from early spring through early summer, including beans, corn, and squash.  I am thinking about spacing out my plantings of some annual fruits and vegetables next year.  Perhaps if some transplants are set in the ground in March, some in May and some in July, I can have harvests over a longer season.  

Eggplants and peppers seem to require several months of warm weather.  Gardening publications typically recommend setting eggplant and pepper transplants in the ground in mid-to-late spring.  However, my experience shows that eggplants planted in early summer can produce fruit, at least in our climate.

September 06 2008 | Eggplant | Comments Off on Lavendar Touch Eggplant