From commentor FelonyGovt:
I’m a novice gardener but have fallen in love with these alstromerias, also known as “lily of the Incas” or Peruvian lily. They’re a tuber, with pretty leaves and gorgeous flowers in a variety of colors.
I’ve been growing them in large pots but plan to start putting some in the ground as well. I really like the yellow ones.
The plant in this last photo is called Rock and Roll, with variegated leaves and dark red flowers — looks like it’s about to bloom.
They are easy to care for but probably need a warm-ish climate. I’m in Southern California.
***********
What’s going on in your garden(s), this week?
Geminid
Thanks for the Alstomeria pictures! Some research shows they are winter-hardy enough to survive in zones 7-10. My friend Joan’s central Virginia yard is zone 7. She’ll be interested, especially because as cut flowers Alstromeria are said to have a “vase life” of up to two weeks.
We had a rainy night here. A good day for digging, and pulling weeds.
OzarkHillbilly
Love the Peruvian lilies, especially the variegated leaves on the one..
The 1 1/2″ of snow we got Tuesday melted in less than 24 hours of course. My Bleeding Hearts suffered the most from the weight of it. The hard freezes that followed don’t appear to have damaged anything very much (we’ll see about the apple crop) and the subsequent rains have kept me out of the veggie garden. Supposed to have sunshine now thru Tuesday. Hopefully things will dry out enough for me to get back in there.
satby
@FelonyGovt: Great pictures, beautiful flowers! I had one of those plants in MI that I didn’t realize needed to be lifted up north. We must have had a mild winter that last year because it came back; it was an apricot color I think. I liked it, I’ll have to see if I can find that color again.
@OzarkHillbilly: I covered my dwart fruit trees as best as I could and they seem to have come through two nights of hard freeze ok. But so, apparently, did the crab apple trees that are too big for me to cover. Time will tell if any blossoms bear fruit. It rained all day yesterday and will barely get to 50° today, so I won’t be doing much in my garden either. And then by Tuesday it’s predicted to be 85°.
Gvg
Those hybrid alastroemerias hate the humid south. I have tried several and they just die. There is one species with not so nice flowers that lives and reassess vigorously but the pretty ones seem to hate us and are rather pricy for an annual. Oh well, other things love it here.
our spring has stayed rather cool for us and my seed grown snapdragons are blooming plus one carnation. Lots of buds, so I may get more flowers soon. Shasta daisies also have buds, and agapanthus. Lilies almost done. Roses had their spring flush and are reloading for next round. Blue ageratum have bloomed all month and have more to come. They are also sprawling and spreading, so that’s nice. If I am lucky I will be able to pot up rudbeckia seedlings, but it looks like the day will be painting garage. Gardening is more fun than painting.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: We’re looking at 70 today, 80 tomorrow and Tuesday, then thankfully back into the upper 60s to low 70s after that. I am not ready for 80 degree temps.
WereBear
@Geminid: I used to have them, on Long Island. Which was Zone 7.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone ???
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Started a bunch of veggies from seed. Almost all of the little seedlings are in the ground as of yesterday. I was a little anxious as we had a couple cold nights this week and one frost, but everything seems to have gotten through.
Only thing still in the pots are some herbs and a few tomato sprouts.
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
WereBear
We are definitely on a warming trend after the snow, so maybe I can pick up some bedding plants when I get out for my 2nd shot on Wednesday.
Zinsky
Living in the upper Midwest, we had a brief flirtation with spring earlier, and now it is back in the 30s and 40s, with snow flurries. It looks like any serious gardening is still weeks away. On a more somber note, a not-for-profit group that I am associated with, planted a weeping willow tree in memory of Daunte Wright at Theodore Wirth Park in Minneapolis on Thursday of last week. Here is a picture of the event in process…
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: Nope, + 80-ish is when my energy for doing anything outside dissapates. The temps are supposed to return to seasonal 60-70-ish after, thank FSM. I want to hang mosquito netting curtains on my porch for the summer before they all hatch ?
satby
@rikyrah: Good morning!
debbie
The snow Tuesday seems not to have hurt the azaleas. The magenta and bright purple ones are opening now. Screw you, ❄️.
OzarkHillbilly
Back to sleep for me.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Betting odds for tonight’s Oscars (link)
Chadwick Boseman and Nomadland are heavy favorites in their categories, with Carey Mulligan and Viola Davis neck-to=neck for Best Actress.
satby
@debbie: A late snow before a hard freeze insulates the plants from the colder temperatures. The weight of wet snow can break branches if a lot falls, but I always hope the forecast is correct if it predicts snow cover before a late freeze. I had to run around in 35° rain covering all my plants that I could before the 27° freeze that came, because our snow amounted to less than an inch before it turned to rain.
MomSense
Gorgeous! I’m a sucker for a variegated leaf. Bet the last one in bloom is amazing.
We are drinking coffee and trying to recover from yesterday.
SectionH
Alstromerias are just excellent. Peruvian lily though? Maybe, I thought that was a different plant.. I guess that’s why I used to try really hard to learn the Hortus names, even they’d changed based on science.
So in that vein, our pelargoniums are doing ok. And the crassula or several ? are ok, and the Mandevilla (ok I’ll look for the botanical name rsn), well that’s complicated. The OG one has bugs, sucky evil ones, but I’ve been nursing a sprout and so far no bugs. I’m thinking about just bagging the old one and throwing the soil away. Because damn. I don’t blame it for not getting enough sunshine, but yeah.
Our clivias have bloomed again. (Well, the orange ones outside around our building are Spectacular this year). Our yellow ones did too.Yes I know I owe satby a clivia. I’ve finally gotten Mr S to agree that we can deal with them in our kids’ yard because they have a yard. It won’t be pretty. I know I need a hack saw for that job. Just as a start. So I can figure out how to send a plant I care about to SB. I think it involves a people chain.
I remember that when I bought the 4 clivias I did at a San Diego Master Gardeners show a few blocks from where I live now (for One Dollar each), the woman working there tried to get me to buy the other two. I was like, Sorry I know what I can plant and deal with. Real gardeners don’t do that? Or some gardeners know when they’re over their heads in a completely new environment..
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Zinsky: What a lovely idea
Geminid
I am finishing a paving project, and yesterday I put down some creeping red fescue seed on disturbed earth around the edge. Creeping red fescue does well in light shade and partial shade, and is a component of many grass blends for shady areas. It’s not red, but a nice light green. It’s called “creeping” because the blades are fine, and lay over when they get long, so it doesn’t neccessarily need mowing.
I added fertilizer and lime, with some straw on top. After last nights rain, the grass should start coming up in ten days.
Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
Thanks for the pics!
I do like Alstromerias! We’ve had A. ‘Laura’ in our garden here in zone 6 in SE PA for years. That is a nice orange-colored variety.
We saw a really cute, short, pink-flowered one growing in seaside dunes near Valpariaso Chile that had flowers while the leaves were dormant. I’d love to have that in our sand-bed/rock garden by our driveway!
debbie
@satby:
Thanks. I’ll have to remember that in the future. We had a freeze just before the magnolias flowered out, so I was expecting it had also gotten to the azaleas.
raven
She has em!
satby
@SectionH: oh, that’s so kind, but you don’t owe me one ?.
I do always take offers though.
Geminid
@SectionH: the Alstromeria flowers remind me of those on Four O’Clocks. These are also from the tropical Americas, and have tuberous roots. Plant cousins? Maybe just parallel evolution, attracting similar pollinators. Four O’Clocks aren’t grown so much now, perhaps because of their spindly form. But they’re easy to grow and fun to see open. A good plant for kids to enjoy.
NotMax
Just ordered a small flowering plant to be delivered to Mom for upcoming holiday. Fingers crossed it arrives looking at least half as good as in their picture.
Thanks to, IIRC, SiubhanDuinne for the plant site recommendation.
WereBear
@Geminid: I actually love the “little tree” look of Four O’Clocks!
O. Felix Culpa
Good morning! Pretty flowers! My tomato seedlings are nearly ready to go in the ground, but we’re several weeks away from final frost date. A few ‘maters are going into containers, so I might plant them and bring them inside if we get any more freezes. I’m experimenting with dwarf tomatoes this year, in addition to several other heirlooms.
A number of my perennials seem to have expired over the winter. I’m about to give up on investing more money into perennials and just seed annuals instead. We’ll see how that goes.
debbie
@NotMax:
White Flower Farm is great! I don’t know anyone who’s been disappointed by what shows up on their doorstep.
satby
@debbie: Second the White Flower farm kudos. Pricey, but everything I ever bought from them flourished.
Since I closed my browser and Kindle to go have some toast, I decided to time how long it took to do a refresh once I reopened my browser and this site. 34 seconds on the front page, additional 10 seconds on this thread. Ridiculous.
For those unfamiliar with Silk, from PCWorld: “Because much of the work of rendering web pages is done in the cloud, Silk can perform faster than your typical mobile browser. With some web pages requiring access to multiple domains and downloading of hundreds of files, handing that task off to the much more powerful computers in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) frees up computing resources and bandwidth that would otherwise be consumed locally on your tablet.”
Faster everywhere but here.
Ken
You could try annuals or perennials that seed. Generally even if the parent plant doesn’t make it, some seeds do. Columbine is good that way, and I’ve heard coneflower as well.
This would not be a good option if you want formal beds. Cross-breeding and seeding leads to messiness.
FelonyGovt
Good morning all! Glad you like the alstroemerias. The Rock and Roll are now blooming and they are gorgeous- really dark red.
I have two little cherry tomato plants that seem to be doing well. I want to get another plant that will give me full size tomatoes. And I just planted some flats of lettuce.
NotMax
@satby
Want some toast?
:)
Geminid
@WereBear: I read that Four O’Clocks were a staple of home flower gardens through much of the last century. The seeds are in most stores, so I guess people still grow them.
NotMax
@satby
This place has become so infested with tweets it’s a wonder it finishes loading at all.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@NotMax: Ooh! That’s pretty! Where did she recommend?
I do like alstroemerias, and I look at them every time I get a plant & seed catalog. Then I check for the deer symbol, and unfortunately, it’s not there… Since I can’t count on them leaving alone even the things they’re supposed to hate, I have to pass by anything they don’t. I’ve usually been sticking to outright poisonous things like foxglove and Lenten rose lately. But a pot of alstroemerias, now, that I could do on the fenced-off patio! And surely potted tubers can be brought into the garage or basement for those in colder climates, just as we do with begonias.
We had ice on the birdbaths two mornings last week, and I was afraid we were going to lose the wisteria buds just before they opened again. That’s happened the last 2 years, and it’s heartbreaking. But no, for some reason they made it through, and They are just breaking into full bloom across the front fence. These are the invasive Asian kind, but the road keeps them in check on one side of the fence, and my husband’s relentless mowing does the job on the house side. There’s more restrained native wisteria on an arbor with roses, but it doesn’t bloom until late May/early June when the New Dawn roses do. It needs some work though, it didn’t bloom much last year. I think it needs to be properly pruned, but that takes getting up on a pretty high step ladder and dealing with a LOT of thorns, so neither of us has had the gumption to do it. Daffodils in front of the house are about done, but the ones that drift across the lawn closer to the road are putting on a show. Bleeding hearts are blooming amidst the Lenten roses. Siberian iris are up and buds are visible. Peonies are still a few weeks away. I wish peonies lasted longer. We always have a huge thunderstorm about 2-2.5 weeks after they bloom that knocks them to the ground and shatters them. I try to bring as many as I can indoors ahead of time if I have a warning, but it puts an end to my favorite flower too soon.
FelonyGovt
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)): Deer is one thing I don’t have to worry about. We do have possums, raccoons, skunks (ugh), snails and slugs.
Wisteria is so beautiful but I don’t think it likes Southern California.
The bulbs I planted are all done already. I’m really beginning to wonder if they were worth the trouble.
Geminid
@Geminid: I’ll plant a few Four O’Clocks in a garden bed twenty feet from my porch. I have to clear the bed first, and dig up three comfrey plants. Comfrey have medicinal vaue, but they grow too big for a small bed. There are five more on the property, so I won’t transplant these but dry them instead.
NotMax
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
Here ya go.
Steeplejack
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)):
White Flower Farm.
satby
@NotMax: Pretty sure it’s not tweets since Twitter takes 6 seconds to load, FB took 5, and even Kevin Drum’s WP site takes only 7, granted that’s a new one.
I think it’s the ads. Mainly the Prospect ones. Plus the bazillion links no one clicks on. Rotating tags, now bloated beyond belief. But whatever.
LiminalOwl (formerly The Fat White Duchess)
No garden, because I have…what’s the opposite of a green thumb? I kill plants when I try to care for them. But we’re finally getting to the point where we can hire someone to help with the yard, and I can post pictures when that happens. Meanwhile, many thanks for the Alstroemerias, which have long been one of my favorites.
(Can I post pictures from our walk down the street? The neighbors have gardens…)
Immanentize
@O. Felix Culpa: I love my African Iris which are perennials that re-seed. Really hardy but beautiful flowers. Unless some night creature chooses them as a cozy bed (as happened to me last year).
Immanentize
duh duh duplicate
Immanentize
@Ken: I am growing columbine from seeds I gathered from a neighborhood walk. They have germinated beautifully and I will put them in a bed in a few weeks. I have heard Columbine take a year of establishing before they flower. So, I will wait….
Immanentize
@LiminalOwl (formerly The Fat White Duchess):
I love your new nym!
But pondering it, aren’t all owls liminal?
I hope you and the Duke are well? It is nearing (vaccinated) time for a back yard meal?
Wag
Our peach tree was beginning to bud when we got two snow storms this past week. I was thrilled and relieved when I checked the tree yesterday afternoon. Looks pretty good! Fingers crossed.
WaterGirl
@FelonyGovt: I buy all my bulbs from Colorblends, and they seem to last way longer than the average bulbs.
Part of the trick, of course, is to make sure that what you plant runs the gamut from early to late, but even with that, Colorblends bulbs stick around far longer than average, in my experience.
WaterGirl
@satby: I can’t speak to the ads, though I agree with you on that.
But the number of rotating tags that are in rotation with each reload never changes. There are 24, no matter how many total rotating tags there are.
Geminid
@LiminalOwl (formerly The Fat White Duchess): Have you tried growing rosemary, in a pot? Rosemaries are pretty tough, especially if you give them a little lime.
debbie
@LiminalOwl (formerly The Fat White Duchess):
Absolutely! As an apartment renter, I have no yard, and any photo I’ve ever shared has been of neighborhood yards. I am happily surrounded by very talented gardeners.
jnfr
The dandelions and grape hyacinths are starting to bloom, so I know it’s spring! The plants I ordered over the winter are starting to arrive, and I am scrambling to dig spaces for them.
This happens nearly every year, and sometimes I manage to get everything planted. Sometimes I don’t manage everything. I’ve learned to accept that.
J R in WV
@satby:
Kindles are almost a computer, but they’re famously slow at processing anything, such as a complex large web page. So everything isn’t Balloon-Juice’s fault. Other issues can be a not blazing fast web connection, ,which is usually our problem.
We have pretty good laptops, good multi-processors with several GB of memory, but our download speed is sometime nearly down to the old phone line/modem connections of the late ’90s–a trickle of data~!!~
Other times we can stream video news, depending upon competition for the sat connection’s bandwidth. We try to watch Rachael Maddow, but so do millions of other people, so meh…
LiminalOwl
@Immanentize: Thank you! And maybe so.
We are both fully vaccinated and would love to see you for a backyard meal.
LiminalOwl
@Geminid: I’ve killed rosemary! But I will try again; thanks gor the suggestion.
(I miss Berkeley, where fennel and rosemary grew wild outside my doir, and raspberries along my walk…)
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Geminid: I live in N CA and grow them, although I don’t get a lot of flowers. Lots of pretty green growth, tho. I can attest they last at least 2 weeks as cut flowers since I have bought them regularly from the floral section of the local Safeway. I started buying cut flowers weekly around last March as the quarantines and shutdowns started and have kept it up since.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Ken: I just bought a couple of large flowered Columbine plants and the plant info even says “self-sows freely”, which I took as a warning. They are in a pot away from most of my other pots. If they can self-sow in the ground around here, good luck!
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)): We have deer, and they’ve never bothered the Alstroemeria. Of course they are tucked in the back a bit, not right along the front where an inquiring fawn could easily take a nibble.
Geminid
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Don’t know what your soil is like, but sometimes a lot of green growth but few flowers is due to excess nitrogen. And adding rock phosphate might contribute to more blooms.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Geminid: The soil is FoxFarm Ocean Forest potting soil. Anything besides bulbs I’ve tried to plant around the house has died, so I am a pot gardener. (On our 20 acres, except around the shop, and the fenced orchard and garden, God is our landscape gardener. She specializes in Oaks and Buckeyes). To be fair, the As were in an ancient clay pot we brought from the old house about 10 years ago and last summer I finally took pity on it and repotted into a larger plastic pot, so they have good soil now and a lot more room. The original stems all died, but the tubers seem happy and this spring I am pleased with a lot of new growth, so I’m optimistic for flowers this year.
satby
@J R in WV: you should have read the rest of my comment, including the excerpt from PC World on how the Silk browser works and my subsequent answer to NotMax with comparison of the other web page examples from this morning. The only site consistently poorly performing is this one. And it’s the main reason I seldom come around here any longer.