Madagascar Palm

I bought this plant over 15 years ago for 99 cents at a Franks. Anybody remember Franks? A plant store that is long gone.

The plant was no more than 2 inches tall and had cute little palm leaves at the top. This sucker grew to over 7 feet tall and it must weigh over 75 pounds. I have to lug it outside every summer and lug it back in in the fall. One year it fell on my head (see previous entry).  I use to replant it every couple of years, but I stopped doing that when it became too heavy and painful to hold. I just throw some leaf mulch in the pot each year to replenish the soil. Actually, after reading about this cactus, I'm surprised it grows at all. I don't have it in sand or cactus soil and I never have. It's just regular old plant soil for this thing.

This year I decided to cut off the top. I read that was the way to  prune them. They even said you could plant the top and it will root. We'll see. I won't be sad if it doesn't work because heaven knows I don't need two of these monstrous things to lug in and out of the house.

What I learned in my internet search is that this plant is related to the plumeria (or frangipani as they say in Florida). If you read my Key West blog, I fell in love with the smell of frangipani. This plant blooms in warmer climates and smells like frangipani. It won't bloom here because it goes dormant in the winter when I bring it inside. It prefers the tropics, like me.

UPDATE 7/13: It's working! The trunk is spouting branches all around the cut. There's about 20 sprouts.

And the top is doing just as well. I don't know if there are roots yet, but it's not dying as the leaves keep getting bigger. Two smaller plants will be so much better than that one large monster plant!!

UPDATE 2013: It worked, 2 years later, and both top and bottom are growing like champs. I hope that now that they are growing in shoots they won't get to be 7 feet tall again.

Lightning Bug!

I saw my first one tonight. It's officially summer! Sadly, I saw only one. His buddies weren't ready to come out yet, although it is hot enough tonight.

Opportunities

I bought this towel at HomeGoods. When I looked at the receipt, for department it said "Opportunities." The department for the blue towels behind it was appropriately named "Table Linens."

I'm wondering why the special department for the rooster. What kind of opportunity did I just buy?

My Garden in Spring

Spring is my favorite season, no doubt about it. I combined my new fascination with PocketBooth with my love of my garden in a little photo collage celebrating spring in my garden.

Given that my garden is 90% in the shade, it's a challenge to get anything to grow. The snowball bush came with the condo and will actually grown into a tree if you let it. The drawf mondo grass took about 12 years to get it to cover my whole path (and I'm still working on spreading it past my yard). I've already discussed my glorious rose, which is giving it's last hurrah this week.

I'm lucky to have a garden in my condo. It's called "Limited Common Area." I'm allowed to landscape and plant (with approval) 20 feet from my house. I can only go ten because of the privacy bushes that somebody planted back there before I got here and besides right past the bushes is a big hill. 10 x 40 feet is just enough garden. I put in a patio and a path and have spent the last 15 years trying to get sun plants to grow in the shade. I know, a futile endeavor, but it gave me something to do.

I stop going out there in June when the mosquitos invade, but the cats stay out there year long. I swear the garden furniture is just for them.

Photo Booth

We use to get family photo booth pictures when we went to Ocean City for vacation. It was a time-honored tradition. I think you can see my niece and nephew growing up in those pictures from baby to teenager. We use to try and fit the whole family in the booth especially when the price went up to $2 a strip!

For Mother's Day, I downloaded the Pocketbooth app on my Droid. It made all of us laugh. I love these pictures, they are better than anything I could have taken with my DSLR. This is my family, goofy and funny and really in love with each other. I'm lucky to have them.

Fuk Luk Sau

I read a Feng Shui book once and tried to implement a few feng shui practices. Years ago, I bought a Fuk, Luk, Sau set. They sit on a higher shelf in the dining room. The shelf is stable until the cats jump on it and knock everything off of it. They don't do that often because I scream bloody heck when they do. But years ago they did it and Fuk and Luk got chipped. Fuk is for happiness, Luk is for wealth and Sau is for longevity. It seems that the breaking of the statues indicates that I'm going to live a long time but with no happiness or wealth. That's quite a bummer.

So instead of living with that fate, I went to Chinatown today to replace my three statues. Here's to changing fate!

Alexandria in May

Last year at this time I was just starting my month in Key West. I loved that month. I loved it so much, I'm probably going to retire in Key West. I would retire there now if I could, but it seems the universe has many, many, many more years of work ahead of me.

I missed a few things while I was away last year. One of them was my rose bush. It only blooms once a year and that's during the first week of May. That trailing rose amazes me each year because it grows in the shade. Almost complete shade. Zephirin Drouhin is it's name. It has some wonderful features, the most important being that it grows in the shade, another being that it's thornless, and yet another is that it is amazingly fragrant. The downsides are that it blooms only once and gets horrible black spot (that could be because of all the shade that I have it in).

I miss Key West, but I love watching my rose bloom. Here's a little edited picture of one of the early blooms. By next week it should be covered in blooms.

Lucky Pennies

I found lucky pennies number 9 and 10 in Georgetown under a bridge in the dirt. I think they have been sitting there a while, collecting a lot of luck I hope!