senzasordino

I live in the Piedmont of NC. I got three Yaupon Holly trees from an online mail order source in the first part of October. After they arrived I couldn't get them in the ground for about 4 days.

I thought I did the right things planting them, dug a hole significantly bigger than the modest root ball (these guys are only about a foot tall) and used new bagged topsoil to fill it up. Watered every three days unless it rained (which it has been, quite a bit, but they are on the top of a slope so I expect drainage isn't much of an issue) for the first 2 weeks they were in the ground.

Now their leaves have turned a nice red brown and have fallen off and I expect they are dead.

Any suggestions as to what went wrong?

These are going to be bananas soon, right?! :)




I also have a couple plants I would really love to know what they are (and if I should stay away from them! The red thing looks sketchy!)

( 2 strange plants! and my small garden. )

I know that was a lot of questions, thank you so much in advance for any help!! :)

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Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

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Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

Does anyone have a good solution to perhaps save my indoor plants from my ever-eating-plants-cat?

I'm running out of space to put my plants on that she can't reach, and I'd love getting more so!
Any suggestions someone tried that worked?

After stirring the contents of the composter a bit, I discovered some huge roaches running around the box. I'm kinda new to this compost thing. Is that normal?

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

We recently moved into our house and are just starting to fix up the yard-gone-feral (the house was empty for six months, which is also about as long as our summer season is here in Florida). As I'm getting out and about, it's very obvious that our yard is uneven. There are a couple of places that are 3'-across circular areas that dip down by an inch or two. They are somewhat hazardous during the day and I expect they'll be even worse at night. Is there a quick and easy way to fix them? We're having our housewarming weekend after next so I'd have this weekend to work on it (stupid non-daylight savings time taking all the weekday sunlight away from me!). I'd also be interested in solutions that take longer because, hey, it has to be fixed eventually. Oh, this is also in the back yard so it's okay if it's a little unaesthetic for a while.

I've been trying to decide what to do with my garden pathways. I decided to go with using straw/wood shavings.  I got a TON of cardboard from work to lay down to kill the weeds.  So what is the easiest way to go about this?  My thinking is (simple!) lay down the cardboard and top with straw/wood shavings.  Sounds easy.  Will that work?



wow.  i cant believe how different my garden looks today.  this is a picture from last winter.  since then i built a 4' picket fence where the metal fence is, i replaced all of the old bed frames with 2x8's and built 2 new beds.  but the weeds in between the beds still grow like.. well... weeds!!!   it's a pain in the butt to mow in between all of those beds so often. 

With so many here reporting late (OMG LATE!) roses blooming, I thought I'd share these. I picked them yesterday at my employer's house. LOL She's had her gardens for about four years now and has *never* picked so much as *one* of the flowers. Since I had the run of the house and grounds yesterday while she was out of town, I decided to show her what she was missing out on.

Included in the arrangement is several pink roses (in various stages of blooming), a few Knockout roses, and foliage from nandina, youpon holly, an unknown shrub, and ornamental grass.

I left before she got home, but she called me later asking who'd sent her flowers and what had happened to the card. When I told her the flowers had come from right outside her own door she just couldn't believe it. I have a feeling my list of duties is going to be expanded to include Chief Flower Cutter and Arranger.

This morning, I turned on the light for my baby pomegrantes and saw a WORM!!
Ok, granted the soil was brought in from a bag in the shed, but when it was warming up and drying out, I thought I thoroughly checked it for bugs.
Do I leave the worm to come out on its own again and pluck it out? Do I use tweezers and get it out? [I am thinking no]? Or do I just let the litle worm live in my cupboard?

I really dont like worms!!

Thanks in advance, and Happy Wednesday! :D

how can I do this? I grew potatos this year and I have a couple of nice ones I forgot about, I just dug them up and I'd love to save them for next year

any tips?

thanks!

I'm on the border of zones 5 and 6

So, yes... I just wrote a comment to the previous post here, went outside and took some pictures. Take a look.
This is my crazy re-blooming iris. I don't know if you can see it on this picture but there're some buds that are still opening



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Can you believe it's November and my roses are blooming!!!! my white creeping phlox is just finished with its [???] second blooming[???]
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what a weird year

Hi! First time poster and first time homeowner. :)

Since I'm extremely new to all this, I'm not sure where to figure this out. My hubby and I just bought a house last Tuesday, and we noticed what seems like hundreds of these cocoons made out of sticks ALL over the front of the house. In all of the bushes, on the windows, hanging from the roof. I have NO idea what they are, my parents don't know, and apparently the pest guy that came by on Wednesday had no idea.

So, if anyone could help identify this, it would be great! My parents did such a wonderful job cleaning out the front of the house, I don't want a swarm of bad insets coming and destroying it all. The pictures of the cocoon, and a tiny bit of the insect inside, are in my journal along with the before and after shots of the front of the house, a few of my new animal neighbors. :)

CLICK FOR PICTURES

Thank you to ANYONE that can help me!

sixwordstories
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dailyfoodie
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I am getting married next year in the Fall on 10/10/10 in my home in Nashville.  I am wondering if anybody in this area knows what flowers, bushes, etc will be blooming at this time.  I'm hoping to try and grow all or most of the flowers that I would need for the wedding as a way of keeping costs down, and our theme is basically anything to do with autumn, so we're not planning on having any out of season flowers being displayed. 

Does anybody have any suggestions on flowers that are easy to grow outdoors, no greenhouse, very little fuss, potentially drought resistant, hardy little things that will survive the summer and bloom in early October in the middle Tennessee area?

I've recently ordered a large number of bulbs from Holland Bulb Farms (see recent post), and I'm wondering what various beneficial things I can do to further their growth when I plant them in a few days. I'm in zone 4a, in Minnesota. I'm planting them for someone close to me I normally plant a garden for in early summer - I'll probably be working in France then, so I'm going to plant them all now, and let her discover in the spring she's getting a beautiful spring garden, something she's always wanted but cannot do on her own.

I would greatly appreciate any helpful hints and tips you find work well towards getting your crocuses, tulips, hyacinths, and alliums (10-12") to grow the strongest and longest possible. What things work best for planting your own?


Here are a few specific questions I have...help with any of them would be ( awesome. )

Thanks in advance!

I was at a park today (Harkness State Park on the shoreline in Connecticut) and I saw what looked like a lemon tree (shrub?). The leaves looked a little smaller than those on my Meyer lemon, and the fruit were also smaller, the size of golf balls. The fruit were also a little on the fuzzy side and not quite yellow, a lttle on the green side. There were LOTS of thorns.

Is it possible a lemon could survive up here? it was a sizeable plant, I don't see how it could be dug up and moved indoors.

any ideas?

sorry no photos, I didn't have my camera handy :(

My younger son (age 10) wanted to play around with my camera while we were at Mom's today. I gave him a quick run-down on how to operate the camera and sent him off on his own to see what he could come up with. While at least half of them were just what you'd expect from a 10-year-old with a camera, some of them were really quite good.

Snapdragon, zinnias and garden mum



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