Succulents and More™

Quite a few photos I take in the garden don’t fit into a regular post but are too nice not to be shared. That’s why I have occasional “This and that” posts. The photos you see below were taken the second and third week of February, most of them during and after the project I described here . Winter is on its way out, and spring is in the air. I hope I didn’t curse us all by saying that out loud! We had a bit of rain this morning, but there’s no significant amount of precipitation in the forecast for the next two weeks. With daytime highs ranging from the low to the high 60s and plenty of sunshine, our aloes will finally start to flower. I hope. Aloe lukeana has been in flower for two months now. In my opinion, it’s one of the best landscape aloes out there. Unfortunately, it’s still hard to find. It’s solitary, so it has to be grown from seed. A good crop of Meyer lemons this year I finally put my cardón ( Pachycereus pringlei ) in the ground. I bought it when it was barely a foot tal...

The front yard project I first mentioned a couple of weeks ago (see “ Eeking out 40 sq. ft. of additional planting space ” and “ Planting the newly gained space in the front yard ”) is closer to completion. After planting the new space, the two major tasks left to do were putting down decomposed granite on the walkways and adding top dressing to the beds. When the material arrived on Tuesday morning – 1 cubic yard of DG and 3 cubic yards of 5/16" red lava rock – I was worried for a second that I’d ordered too much. But that’s how it always is; in the end, there’s very little left over. Tuesday morning, right after delivery By Tuesday evening, I’d spread most of the red lava: Wednesday morning On Wednesday morning, I distributed the rest of the lava and spread the DG on the paths, both the walkway into the backyard through the new gate... Just in time for the rain on Thursday ...as well as the walkways around the two succulent mounds inside the front yard fence: The original pathfi...