A few weeks ago I started my second greenhouse project for Sommer Gardens, a new hoop house.  This project followed the completion of a large shade house friends and I constructed during the holidays. While I really wanted to build a nice greenhouse with a heater and fans, finances dictated I switch to a less expensive hoop house kit.The kit arrived on a 16 foot pallet, three quarters of a ton of tightly bound galvanized steel pipe ready to be assembled. Its new home was going to be an open ...

My Angel Trumpets will have a nice surprise soon when they are covered with a new shadehouse I'm building with the help of friends during the Christmas Holidays.  When completed there will be just under 9,000 sq ft of growing space under the cover of shade cloth.  During the winter growing season a layer of clear poly will add additional protection should we have sub-freezing weather.The toughest part of the construction project was sinking 80 sixteen foot 4x4's amongst my brugmansia.  Our ...

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 ...

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 ...

While everyone knows of the Blue Bird of happiness, well I've encountered the Blue Jay of happiness.  This cutie has been hanging out in a group of my older brugmansia seedlings for a couple of weeks now.  It tends to hang out near me when I'm out there and as you can see, it does not seem to be afraid either.  Could this be love???

While I was home for lunch today I managed to capture a photo of the space shuttle launch.  Here it is taking off over the horizon.Even though I'm smack dab in the center of the state, shuttle launches are still dramatic.

I would like to welcome my new blog readers that came over from Blotanical.com.  Thanks for the nice comments.  Please visit often to see what surprises my hybridizing efforts produce.I had a major event over the weekend so I missed a couple of days of new bloom pictures.  I'll make uip for it this week by posting a few extras.  I'm heading out now to see what is blooming this morning.

Just before dusk tonight I spotted this rainbow illuminating the sunset lit sky.   The real pot of gold at the end of this rainbow is the cool weather that is moving in on Saturday.