We bought some tiny Passion Vine plugs at the beginning of the season for 99 cents a piece.  If they lived fine, if not we were going to be out 2 whole dollars.  Well they have lived and are thriving.  The vines that we bought at maybe 6 inches are now running over the top of our 6 foot fence.  Blooms began to show up the past couple of weeks but they had yet to open.

Until today!

James went home for lunch and took a picture for me, just in case something happens to the flower before I get home from work.  He knew I would be PISSED if I missed it. 

In the side view you can really see all the layers of this flower and this is what I am drawn to.  They are so different and so beautiful.  Alien-like at times.

In this view you can also see that the leaves have been chewed on quite a bit.  Our passion vine houses two very fast growing caterpillars.  We decided to leave them and let them have a constant food source.  I’ve enjoyed watching them grow and hope to catch them in their cocoon.

Tags: Design, Flowers, Gardening, Organic Gardening, Organic Pest Control, Pictures by Shala
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The more we learn about how water is our most precious natural resource – the more we want to find the best ways to conserve it.  Now we try to do native plants for the most part (I mean seriously, why wouldn’t you want to do that?) – but on the few we will need to water more… we have come up with a great way to utilize a lil bit more of your soaker hose.

What we have started to do is sort of wrap each plants base in the soaker hose.  It is hard to explain without a picture, so let us get to that first…

As you can see in the picture, if you will give the base a nice lil wrap… you get 360 degree watering out of your hose, and you get a foot instead of 4 inches to help distribute that water.

We also like to group our plants so that we can water all of them at the same time.  Which means when you wrap each plant with the soaker hose… you have to do a series of them.  Not a big deal.  Just create a daisy chain (seems like appropriate naming in this circumstance) of sorts.  See below for a picture of this daisy chain method…

Pretty cool right?  You can see at the very end, we have it wrapped twice with the slack.  When we add a plant, we just coil that slack backwards until we hit our new plant and then wrap it.

Do you have tips to share with us?  Post it in the comment area or email them to us.  If it saves time, money, effort… pretty much if it makes gardening easy – let us know about it.  And we will do our best to pass on any tips we find useful, because we are cool like that.

Other Gardening Tips:

Gardening Tip: Let Your Strawberries Read The Newspaper

Tags: DIY, Design, Drunk, Flowers, Gardening, Gardening Tips, HOT AS HELL, Living Green, Make A Difference, Organic Gardening, Pictures, Recession Gardening by James
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In a weeks time, we have been the recipents of two awesome surprises – who says snail mail isn’t cool anymore?  Pffft.

On Saturday, Shala called me while I was at work and said a package just showed up from Fiskars.  Anyone who knows gardening and gardening tools… knows the name fiskars.  Well I couldn’t wait to come home and check it out.  Being a Fiskars fan is something that is hard not to be.

Well when I came home I found this…

Ok… not the grass shears – but the card & Big Grip Trowel.  As if that wasn’t enough… the trowel was engraved with my name.  Check the close up below…

We can’t thank Fiskars enough, we love their products and honestly… we wouldn’t stand behind a product if we didn’t feel it was worth the money.  So if you are looking for gardening tools with high quality, try Fiskars.

And those shears you saw in the first picture… better get you some.  They are THAT good.  Just sayin’…

So after a hard week at work, Fiskars came through… but then yesterday – at lunch I checked the mail.  And look what we got from Carri from Read Between The Limes…

(click here for a bigger picture)

Carri is our friend on Twitter, and we got into a convo about tomatillo – and how we had never grown them.  Next thing we know she was sending us seeds… then next thing we know there is almost a seed type for each month of the year!  It was so nice, and check the goods…

Grande Rio Verde Tomatillo Seeds

Pineapple Tomatillo Seeds

Tomatillo Seeds

Purple Dragon Carrot Seeds

Early Scarlet Radish Seeds

Bright Lights Swiss Chard Seeds

Fava Beans

Lupini Beans

Yard Long Beans

Purple Top Turnip Seeds

Seriously.  Too cool.  Shala is about to plant a bunch of beans anyhow… but we are worried about the heat – so we are going to save a bunch for later on in the year.  Thanks Carri!  We owe ya.  Can’t wait to try them out.

So all of that is to show you something… not everyone is a spammer.  The entire internet isn’t a cesspool of nastiness.  It is no different than the real world.  There are good folks.  There are some bad ones.  And a few crazies.   We are thankful to have met so many good ones.

Tags: Container Gardening, Crafty Crap, DIY, Design, Flowers, Gadgets, Gardening, Living Green, Nerdy Stuff, Organic Gardening, Personal, Recession Gardening, Springy by James
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