Africanaussie

My microgreens came up so nicely and I was just about ready to harvest some for my dinner, when -whoosh - overnight something mowed them down - they are now just a bunch of little green sticks.  Sometimes growing food in the tropics is just way too hard. Luckily I can spend time with my flowers - the sexy pink lady is flowering again.  I was trimming some branches and look who hopped onto my hand!  I found him a nice leafy branch to move onto.

As I mentioned previously, the back section was getting rather overgrown, so I ventured into the heleconia/ginger section with my loppers.   Heleconia stalks flower and then die, so I decided to cut back some of the flowering branches and bring them inside. These red heleconias are my favourite, and I am so glad that they are now flowering profusely.  I need to figure out how to divert the new shoots so that they remain inside the bed, and I think continually cutting away the dying branches will allow the room for them to stay contained.  There is still way more to cut back, but for now I am enjoying flowers in the house.   The sexy pink ladies are so hard to put into an arrangement - maybe it would have looked better with another one in the center instead of the cordeline.  I was cutting back the lemongrass and found this tiny creature -  his skin had a metallic sheen to it.  I am still trying to find a way to make the perfe...

Years ago when my non gardening youngest daughter was living with me in Florida USA, we bought a hibiscus together.  I don't know if that was its official name but we called it poodle hibiscus.   She has always requested that I try to grow that beautiful flower again. I live in Australia  now and she in New York, so I love to find connections that reduce the miles between us.  Over the weekend this bloomed :  I must have at some stage found one and taken  a cutting.   I nurtured that little slip not really remembering which one it was.  I e-mailed my daughter, and she confirmed it was just like the first poodle hibiscus we grew together.  Don't you love those delicate red veins running through the petals? the lower "tail" part looks so lush and full, yet delicate, and what a gorgeous salmon color. My daughter is at the moment...