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 ...

That's what crossed my mind Sunday morning when I stumbled upon another downed fox in my yard. I heard the ruckus during the night, but had no idea my dog Inga was battling with another fox.  I assumed she was harassing my resident armadillos that frequently rummage through my yard at night. There must be some deep hatred for foxes embedded in her genes.  What was really strange this time around is that when I moved the fox's head to get a better view,  Inga ran up and gave me a puzzled look ...

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 ...

Here we go, the temperature just dropped down to 32f and it is only 10:00pm.  I was hoping tonight's weather forecast would be wrong, as they often are, but this one is one is dead on.  Accuweather did not have the temperature dropping below freezing till 5:00am, but Weather Underground was predicting 30 at 10:00pm.  This is not good, we could have 8 hours below freezing!   Now it's 31.4, yikes!!!!  Accuweather is forecasting a low of 28 by dawn, while Weather Underground predicts ...

It looks like D-day is just around the corner.  The dreaded day I'm referring to is our first night with frost and potentially freezing weather.  I was hoping we could slide through the winter without either, but the odds of that happening are not looking good right now.  Here's what Accuweather has to say - "Clear with the temperature approaching the record low of 28 set in 1979; watch for a hard freeze".  Oh joy, guess I know how I'll be spending the new year, covering plants with frost ...

So much for getting a yellow double brugmansia for Christmas. The bloom is fully open now and it is white.  Darn that Grinch! The bloom is a nice healthy sized bloom with a fragrance so I'll keep it around for a few more bloom cycles to see what it does. The day after I shot the picture below it started getting a faint pink hue to it.  Unfortunately I accidentally snapped the bloom off as I was examining the inside of the flower.  Now it is time to play the waiting game as new buds are ...