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.