My favorite garden pictures of 2013

 

I hope you and your families have a happy, healthy and safe NEW YEAR.

Merry Christmas from the DragonFly Garden

For the last six weeks the DragonFly garden blog has been a little quite due to the flare up of an old knee injury.  Is a little difficult gardening wearing a knee immobilizer, finally this week I was able to take it off and the knee feels much better.

 

I had no trouble using my camera

The Brunfelsia tree is full of flowers this time of the year, the three shades of purple in these flowers make the tree look like a Christmas tree.

The Solandra tree (Cup of gold flower) bloomed for the first time this year.  My tree grew from a cutting I got from a neighbor, and he got his tree from a cutting he smuggled on a visit to the Canary Islands.  The Solandra plants are native of Central America, and how they got to the Canary Islands.  Maybe someone smuggled a cutting from Central America.    

 The Azaleas are blooming early this year,

 

Miniature Bougainvillea flower

May the spirit of Christmas bring you and your families’ peace, love and happiness.  

Winter vegetable garden is in.

My winter vegetable garden is planted and already producing.  This year I’m emphasizing mix salad greens and herbs, previous experience taught me that mix greens do better in a low sun area. Located in a strip of land between my house and my neighbor, the location of my vegetable garden is not ideal but it is the only place I have available.  During the winter season when the sun is low in the southern sky, this area of the garden gets only a couple of hours of sun in the early morning. 
This year I planted, tomatoes, radicchio, broccoli, eggplant, Swiss chard, spinach, peppers, cucumbers, mesclun mix and romaine lettuce.  So far a few of these plants are doing well, others not so (the tomatoes as always are starting poorly)
This year we had an unusually wet early winter, I’m hoping that as the dry season takes over and the only water the garden gets comes from my watering can things will get better.