Food and Garden Festival at Fairchild Garden

Today I visited the Botanical Gardens of Fairchild for their Food and Garden Festival. Featuring their 32nd annual Spring plant sale. The weather was hot but the food and plants made up for it.

Local honey from Miguel's bees

One of my favorite sellers is the Redland Organic Herb Farm, the owner Carolyne is a wealth of information on how to take care and cook with the plants. I purchased shives, and yerva buena

Only looking none followed me home

Art at Fairchild

These are the plants that followed me home, among them a succulent and a new bromeliad

Pictures from a different angle

My new tenet

Got you!!!!

Finally one gardenia

The flowers in this bromeliad look like little chicks waiting for food

Kings mantle

The wildlife in my garden.

Making the DragonFly a friendly place for birds, butterflies and any other creatures, is one of the reasons I garden. Today I took a picture of this Red Admiral butterfly, a first in my garden. (She was too fast for my camera.)


Monarch butterfly.

I try to make the garden bird friendly by placing several bird feeders and baths through out, and by growing plants that can be good-hiding places. My urban garden limits the variety of birds that visit it, mostly doves, house sparrows, starlings, grackles and blue jays.

This Blue Jay was not happy posing for pictures.



Ringed Turtle Dove



The Rock Dove or City Doves. (They can empty a bird feeder in one seating)



Mother owl, perch in my back porch fan


For those of you that are new to my blog, I am posting these pictures again. Two years ago we were bless by having a Screech Owl picked our garden to nest. My wife called her Golda because she resemble Golda Meir the former prime minister of Israel. To this date that was the highlight of my garden’s wildlife encounters.

Baby owl

Happy Easter everyone

My working vacation – Part II

Today I finished the trellis, I am not all that happy with it, but this is the best my 58 year old body with arthritic hands can do. I had an idea in my head to make a more grandiose trellis with arches and a small wooden fence to divide the courtyard from the rest of the garden. (The mosquitoes and the heat took care of that idea)
Many of you asked about the Mexican flame, well I didn’t take it out; I’m hoping it will grow back. This time, I am not worry how big the vine gets, the new trellis can take it.

The rest of the week, I am taking it easy, I’ll take some pictures, pull some weeds and prepare the garden for our annual family Easter bash.

My working vacation – Part I

Yesterday I started working on the new trellis in my side garden.

First on the list was getting rid of the old trellis with the overgrown Mexican flame vine.

The Mexican flame, like must vines are beautiful to look at when they are in full bloom, but they are a pain to maintain. (This picture was taken two weeks ago)

Is going to take a couple of garbage pick up to hold away the Mexican flame.

My plans are to build a replacement wooden trellis, one that can take the weight of an overgrown vine.

Spring South Florida style

My Plumeria tree is beginning to bloom

I am having so many problems with the blogger publisher. Moving pictures and the spacing on the posts are impossible. Is there anyone out there having the same problems? Tonight I canceled the post with all the comments by mistake trying to fix the problem.

Morning surprise

This morning I was surprised by this succulent plant, overnight these five gorgeous flowers bloomed (totally unexpected). By the time I got home in the afternoon the flowers were dead.

That’s the problem with most succulents, their blooms are stunning but they only last one day.

Does anyone know the name of this plant?

Counting the days

I have a week’s vacation coming up April 17 to the 22nd. I am not planning to go anywhere, but I will be working in the garden. (I'm turning off my work blackberry). There are a couple of projects that I have in mind, and one involves construction. I’ll blog about it later. Queen palm Bees love the buttercup flowers The tallest Hollyhock ever in my garden This weekend was tax preparation weekend (so much fun) my time in the garden was limited, all I had time to do was take a few pictures and feeding the birds.

Taking the garden in a different direction.

This past weekend I planted this avocado tree, a gift from a friend. My family is big consumers of avocados, during the season and we spend a great deal of money buying locally grown avocados, so is time to start growing our own.

It will be a few years before I can harvest fruits from this little guy.

I have come to the realization that my garden has an extensive variety plants, but other than my banana and key lime trees, I have no other fruit trees. We are blessed with great weather, which is excellent for growing tropical fruit trees, so I decided to move in that direction. The only problem with this new direction is that with every fruit tree planted, something else has to go.

First on the list is this giant white bird of paradise. I don’t like taking plants out of my garden, especially one I planted at the very beginning, but she is getting too big and is damaging the fence.

This space should be plenty for a mango and a couple of papaya trees.