With many of my potted brugmansia seedlings frozen back to ground level, I had to take a wait and see approach to see which ones would live on and sprout back.  After cutting the frozen plants back to the ground, the soil surface was now exposed to bright sunlight and an influx of weed seeds from a neighboring field.  Normally I would apply some pre-emergent weed preventative on the surface, but I was afraid that may interfere with the plants ability to sprout back from the roots.  I tried ...

Seeing how I'm sort of playing catch-up here I thought I would share a few photos from the post-freeze clean-up.  To recap, the winter of 2009 was said to be the worst ever here in Central Florida.  I had planned to build a large shade house last fall to protect my brugs, but was not able to do so.  I relied on frost cloth, plastic sheeting, and an endless supply of water to protect my brugs.  The damage was great and I estimate that I lost about 30% of my plants.Here's a photo from early ...

As you can see by the photo below, this new seedling has already earned a thumbs up!This bloom is from a cross I made involving Jamie's Monkey Business x America.  It bloomed for the first time last December and at that time the blooms were more orange.  The first set of blooms also had dropped skirts instead of the stuffed skirts I'm seeing now.  This does not surprise me because often it takes several bloom cycles for a new double to either get its act together or not.  Sometimes they ...

The project that captured most of my free web time this spring was iBrugs.com.  iBrugs has nothing to do with Apple, but as the name suggests, is totally focused on brugmansia.  iBrugs is actually an acronym for the International Brugmansia Society.  Next question, "What is the International Brugmansia Society?"  That's easy, I'll just past the mission statement below:

No I didn't give up blogging, I just had to focus my energy on a couple of other web projects this spring.  While both are still a work in progress, I now have time to get back up to speed with things here.  Also motivating me to post is that the brugs that survived the freeze are rebounding nicely.  I have had a bunch of blooms appear this past month and have been able to get a couple dozen seed pods to set with hopefully more to come.  I made over 50 additional crosses since last week, but ...

Central Florida's chilly winter this year is going into the record books as the coldest in nearly 30 years.  The National Weather Service stated this week that this has been the coldest winter season on record since 1981.  Winter does not appear to want to give up its hold on us so we could be on the way to setting the record as the coldest winter season on record. The only upside to all this is that our much-needed rainfall has been above average this winter.  I say let's close the ...

This has been a tough move for my blog.  I must have installed and uninstalled it on my new server at least a dozen times this week trying to get it display properly.  I think I finally have it right. I'm hoping this post will make it online so I can get back on track with my garden blog.Don't expect to be inundated with posts the next several days.  I still have a bunch of my event websites to move and upgrade, and then of course my SommerGardens.com site needs to be built from the ground ...

My blog is currently being moved to a new server and should be back up and running by March 1.