Happy New Year

Today I spent the last day of 2016 walking the garden and taking it all in.  We had a beautiful sunny day and the temperature was in the mid sixties, something rare for us these days.

 This little guy is a regular winter visitor to the garden.  According to my bird guide this is a Northern Watherthrush Warbler.  He is an experience traveler, spending summers in Canada and winters down in South Florida, the Caribbean and Central America.

 Yellow Sulphurs butterfly, they are fast flyers and difficult to photograph.

 This is my lunch room crowd

I like to end the year with this quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"It is not true that people stop pursuing their dreams because they are getting older.  They grow old because they stop pursuing their dreams"
I hope all your dreams come true in 2017.

Merry Christmas and a Happy Hanukkah

From our family to yours we wish you all a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah and a healthy 

New Year

Merry Christmas and a Happy Hanukkah

Back to the garden after a long layover

I been away from the garden for too long, between a hectic schedule at my 9 to 5 job, the holidays, family demands and weather it has been almost a month since I had any work done in the garden.  Today the weather was perfect and the garden had my undivided attention.

There is always something that needs to be done, and my back garden was in a desperate need for an uplift.  No need to go to the local nursery, I had everything needed from the mulch and the gravel and a few plants that needed to be replanted.

This is my hide away, where I do some of the planting and where all the garden leftovers end up.  Today I cleaned it up and threw away things I will never use and added this low entry frame.  I did it this way so it can hold the branches from my Lychee tree. 

Today at the DragonFly Garden

The brunfelsia tree is in full bloom. Excellent timing, it is at peak for the holidays

 Other blooms from the garden today

 Mourning Doves are the most popular birds in my feeder, I love this picture

UPDATE - My vegetable garden was hit with a week long of rain and is not looking too good, I might have to replant some of the tomato plants.

The new winter vegetable garden

Today I finished the vegetable / kitchen garden, this year is all on containers and in a new location in the back of the house.  This new location is the only place in the garden where I get four to five hours of sunshine in the morning.  I planted tomatoes, herbs, arugula, spinach, swiss chard and three strawberry plants.  We will see if the new location will be productive, I keep you posted.

Ramble at Fairchild Garden

This weekend was the annual Ramble plant sale at Fairchild Garden.  This yearly event is a must for South Florida gardeners, I make sure to attend every year.  This year I didn't come home with any exotic plants but I did bring home some herbs and tomato plants for my new kitchen garden.  I also purchased a few strawberry plants to plant in hanging baskets.  

The weather has been great in South Florida lately, perfect for gardening, unfortunate my nine to five job has been demanding with my time.  I am a little late with my winter planting, usually vegetable gardens should be all done by the end of October.  

The Painted Buntings are back

This Painted Bunting couple are regulars at my bird-feeder everyday.  They were here last winter and are back for the second year.  There is also a second female that comes around sometimes, I am not sure if they are a family.  The male painted bunting is one of the most beautiful birds around, I am so lucky to these two in my garden. 

The snowbirds are back

I noticed that my birdfeeder is getting busy with new winter arrivals.  This is the time of the year when many migratory birds stop by our gardens, on the way south.  Others stay around for the winter season.  So far I have seen a Blue Gray Gnatcatcher, a hummingbird, a female Painted Bunting and a beautiful male Cardinal (Cardinals are not migratory birds but for some reason they don’t stay around here during the summer)

 This Blue Jay is a year-round resident and the king of the birdfeeder.  These days he is not too happy that the dinning room is getting crowded.

This week at the DragonFly garden:

I started one of my big winter projects, moving the kitchen/vegetable garden to a sunny area in the back of the house.  First I had to find a new location for my collection of cactus and succulents. 

( Is time to pressure clean the pavers)

The work continues next week.

 This is the time for my bougainvilleas in containers to put on their winter colors.

Ten years of blogging

This past week was my blog’s tens anniversary.  Is hard to believe that I been writing this garden blog for the last ten years.  In the early days of my gardening hobby I was reading other gardener’s blog to get pointers and ideas, after a while I decided to start my own blog and share my own experience with my fellow internet gardener.  It has been a tremendous ride in the past ten years we have seen so many changes in this media.  Today the Dragonfly Garden Blog is available on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, social media has taken off and has made our little corner of heaven available to a worldwide audience.

 Ten years is a long time and I have evolved as a gardener.  Today my garden is not as neat as it used to be, there are more tropical fruit trees, more mixing and matching of different kinds of plants, pollinator plants everywhere and many small ecosystems within the garden.  The future is hard to predict, it will probably bring less lawn grass and more wild places and wild life.

I thank you for following me on my little adventure, here is to the next ten years.

The yearly hurricane practice run

So hurricane Matthew was in our neighborhood this week, we were so lucky that it decided to pass by one hundred miles offshore of Miami.  Every year we get a couple of these storms near by and every year we all go into hurricane preparation mode.  As far as my house goes, I have impact windows so the house is protected; my problem is everything I have in the garden.   I usually put most of my garden decorations and container plants inside my back porch and close the shutters. 

This year Matthew decided to come when my wife and I were on vacation in Colorado enjoying the beautiful fall colors.  We made it back to Miami on Wednesday morning in time before the local authorities closed the airport.

Today was a day of putting the garden back together and cleaning up the mess left behind by the tropical storm winds we got.  Overall everything was OK except for a couple broken branches and lots of leaves on the ground.  The people of Haiti, Eastern Cuba, The Bahamas, northern Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas were not as lucky, I hope and pray for a quick recovery for all affected.

    

 On a different topic here are some of the photos I took during my visit to the Rocky Mountains where fall colors were at peak time.