After several year's of relatively mild winters, the dark side of mother surfaced again this month.  In January we had a hard freeze that brought temperatures down to the mid 20's for a couple of days.  Now, just a few weeks later we are back in Mother Nature's deep freeze.  All I can say is that I hate cold weather!!!!!!!!   I know this is going to be a major setback to my hybridizing program.  My motto in times of crisis has always been, "deal with it and move on", and that's what I will ...

There's a reason why my garden blog has become stagnant, it's called too much nice weather!  When the weather's nice outside, I spend all my free time working on my plants. Then when I'm done I'm too tired to blog.  I figure I have just under 9,000 brugmansia seedlings growing now.  I'm not sure why I let this number get so out of control, but every time I have a seedling bloom that is a potential keeper it makes it all worthwhile.I have lots of notes and pictures to share in the new year so ...

It has been six months since my last post, but I have a good excuse for not writing. Tending to my thousands of baby brug seedlings takes precedence over blogging.  Since my last post I have started seeds from over 150 new crosses.  That equates to about freshly potted 3,000 liners, 75 four inch pots of seedlings waiting to be moved up to liners, 30 four inch pots of seeds recently planted and waiting to sprout, and over 1,000 liners that I just moved up to 1 gallon pots.  Add all this to ...

Today I was able to assess the actual damage my plants incurred from our holiday freeze. My brugmansia are all sprouting new growth and in many cases, buds are beginning to form as well.  Out of the 1500 brug seedlings I have, I think I only lost one.  Almost all of my in-ground brugmansia survived too.  I had at least 75 individual  plants planted in the ground and every single one of them survived. Most just had damage to the tender growth, but a couple of the younger ones were beat up ...

I know I have been fairly quiet on my garden blog the past couple of weeks.  The primary reason is that my work and travel has been keeping me real busy.  It did not help that our recent freeze brought my hybridizing program to a standstill leaving me very little positive things to report on.  While the work and travel part is not going to change much in the immediate future, I plan to be getting back on track with my hybridizing projects by the end ...

Now that both myself and my plants have thawed out, I can assess the freeze damage.  It is not a pretty sight around here as you can see by looking at this picture of one of my larger angel trumpets, brugmansia Coral Glow.    Fortunately it did not get nearly as cold as many forecasters had predicted.  The low temperature hovered around 29 for a couple of hours and briefly dropped to 28.  That is much better than the 24-26 that was forecast to be the low.Over the weekend I was able to assess ...

My brugmansia Ambrosia x Creamsicle bloom is almost open but the color has not changed much.  It is still a cream to light yellow color.The bloom does have a nice texture to it and it looks like it will be well shaped double flower.  It also has a pleasant fragrance associated with it.  Now if I could only inject some yellow color genes into it I may have a keeper on my hands.

One of the toughest parts of growing out brugmansia seedlings is waiting for the blooms to open.  Sometimes it takes weeks for the buds to open.  Of course the more you watch them, the longer it takes them to open.  With brugs, the dominant color is white.  For me this equates to about every three out of four seedlings I grow having white blooms.  This monster bud is playing with my mind right now.  I know it is going to at least be a double bloom and it appears to have a yellowish tint to ...